Helen Levitt

With Charles Hartman, San Francisco

Christie's, New York, 15 October 2004, Sale 1423, Lot 298

Silverstein Photography, 2006

Helen Levitt’s photographs from the 1930s and 40s illuminate the human element of a bustling city that was in the midst of great change in the wake of The Great Depression.  

In the essay “Helen Levitt’s New York,” Sandra S. Phillips, the former photography curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, emphasizes the singular quality of Levitt’s perspective; “Her view of the city is also an ideal one: It is a place where children play, where mothers tend their children, where old people gossip and observe. No one seems to work there, and, although there is deprivation, no one suffers from it. Anger, sorrow, and tension exist but only as moments in a grand and continuous continuum” (Helen Levitt, p. 19).