Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt.

LEVITT, Helen.

$4,000.00

Item Number: 117735

New York: Powerhouse Books, 2005.

First edition of Levitt’s impressive collection of previously unpublished color photographs. Oblong octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Association copy, inscribed by the author to fellow photographer Jeff Wall on the title page, “For Jeff Wall. Helen Levitt.” The recipient, Jeff Wall, has been a key figure in Vancouver’s art scene since the 1970’s. He is best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs that explore Vancouver’s mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Foreword by John Szarkowski. An exceptional association.

In 1959, and again in 1960, Helen Levitt received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph in color on the streets of New York, where she had photographed two decades earlier in black-and-white. This resulting body of work was shown as a continuous slide projection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art - an early example of a slide show presentation by a museum and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world. Slide Show presents more than one hundred photographs, more than half of which have never been exhibited or published before.