A Way of Seeing.

£750 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

Helen Levitt first became aware of photography's potential when she visited the exhibition 'Documentary and Anti-Graphic: Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson Walker Evans Manuel Alvarez-Bravo,' organised by Julien Levy at his New York gallery in 1935. Evans became a mentor to Levitt, teaching her various techniques to enable her to photograph in the street so that her subjects would not notice her. Levitt returned the favour by accompanying Evans on the subway when he took the photographs, which were later published as Many Are Called (1965). Evans also introduced Levitt to his then-collaborator, James Agee, who would become her collaborator and strongest admirer. This book was born in 1945 when Levitt and Agee worked together on In the Street, a documentary film shot in Harlem. The photographs were mostly taken on the streets of Harlem, with some on the Lower East Side in the late 1930s and 1940s, and Agee wrote the text in the mid-1940s. Publication was planned for 1946 by Reynolds and Hitchcock but postponed and cancelled following the death of one of the firm's partners. The project remained unrealised until 1965, ten years after Agee's death when The Viking Press published a Way of Seeing. In his essay Agee writes: 'At least a dozen of Helen Levitt's photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine

• Binding: Hardcover

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