One, Two, Three, More

Name: One, Two, Three, More
Author: Helen Levitt
ISBN: 9781576878521

by Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt's earliest pictures are a unique and irreplaceable look at street life in New York City from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1940s. There are children at play, lovers flirting, husbands and wives, young mothers with their babies, women gossiping, and lonely old men. A majority of these photographs have never been published. Other pictures included in this book are now world-famous, now part of the standard history of photography. Together they provide a record of New York not seen since Levitt's pioneering solo show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Levitt's photographs are in some of the best photography collections in America, including: The Met, MoMA, The Smithsonian, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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"Oh, to have the brilliant eye of the late photographer Helen Levitt. These photos, taken between 1934 and 1946 (and most never published before), bring a grubby, gritty New York City to life. Women sit on stoops reading the newspaper, or prop their elbows on a window ledge with a pillow for comfort, keeping watch on the action below. Children play in the streets with makeshift toys: a bag filled with flour, a nub of chalk, a piece of string. Life then – before television, before air conditioning – was lived on the street, and Levitt was right there, a sly and sharp observer. Each one of these images is a marvel."

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