Photo of the Week #246

May 22, 2023
Helen Levitt took this photograph in 1959, the year she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that gave her the financing to begin photographing actively in color, a very expensive medium in the 1950s. The young boy's embrace is the kind of expressive gesture that Levitt was already known for capturing in black and white. Works like this established Levitt as among the first to extend the art of street photography into the realm of color. 

In 1974, the Museum of Modern Art photography curator John Szarkowski devoted MOMA's first solo exhibition of color photography to Levitt. With color printing still very costly, the exhibition was presented as a slideshow. Despite these accolades Levitt's color work remained a lesser known chapter, in part because only a small number of color prints were ever produced (and the bulk of her early transparencies were stolen in the 1970s).

In the early 2000s advances in digital printing afforded new opportunities to explore Levitt's work in color. Between 2001 and 2008, several new books devoted to her photographs were published, and Levitt worked with print labs to scan her original transparencies and negatives, and proof the prints for the color separations. This allowed Levitt to see some color images printed for the first time, and to see familiar images printed with a color saturation that had previously been unavailable. In 2008, Levitt was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, which featured new prints of never-before-seen color photographs.

We are offering a unique portfolio of twelve color photographs by Helen Levitt in a presentation called BODY LANGUAGE. This set of later career digital prints celebrates Levitt's gift for capturing the wide range of communication found in gesture and movement, from moments of surprising tenderness to outbursts of spontaneous humor, all in vivid color.