Manhattan Transit – The Subway Photographs of Helen Levitt. First edition (2017). First impression. Medium format hardback.
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About Manhattan Transit After a four-decade hiatus Helen Levitt returned to photographing the subway. And seemingly she seems to have picked up exactly where she had left off in 1938. But in general her photography was less restricted, more in keeping with her looser street photographs. By the 1970s, public behaviour on the subway was much less formal, there was ‘elbow room’. This is the most comprehensive publication of Helen Levitt’s photographs from the New York subway, many of which are published here for the first time.
Helen Levitt’s pictures haunt like an intimate ghost. Because they are curious and powerful. Her photographing of the subway started after she accompanied Walker Evans while he did the same. More empathetic and informal with a camera, Levitt’s finest photographs came from being present to the world. Therefore, allowing herself to be seen as a fellow citizen, as opposed to a photographer. The disarming ease of Levitt’s pictures builds up, page after page, into an undeniably singular attitude to the medium and the world.
