Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt (1913–2009) is regarded as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American street photography. Through her nuanced observation of everyday urban life, she had a lasting impact on the genre and created a body of work that continues to resonate through its poetic visual language and universal themes. This exhibition, which is the first retrospective worldwide drawn from her archive, offers a new insight into her work, bringing together over two hundred photographs, including many previously unknown images. The show features her iconic New York street scenes from the 1930s and 1940s, photographs from her journey to Mexico in 1941, and a continuous projection of rarely shown color photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. The retrospective reveals Levitt’s remarkable sensitivity to fleeting gestures, social relationships, and life in public space. At the same time, it invites a more thoughtful consideration of the history of street photography and of the social and material dimensions of the photographic image.