Curator: Jorge Ribalta
Nº of works: around 100 photographs in colour and black and white and a video projection.
Contact: Ana Berruguete
Catalogue by La Fábrica.
Helen Levitt (1913-2009) is one of the most important American photographers of the second half of the XX century. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, she left New York in a very few occasions. She started working as an assistant for a photographer in Bronx who taught her the photographic technique before she tried her own framings. Her masters were Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, she met them both personally. From one she learned how photography can become art and from the other not to be sentimentalist and keep a distance with what she photographed.
Her work brings up a singular way of looking, his style centred on the urban life, mainly on the streets of New York. Always focused on little moments in daily life, apparently banal moments with a considerable metaphorical meaning. Levitt’s images have the capacity of suspending time and movement obtaining photographs of an endless vital power.
This exhibition is the first homage to the artist after her death in March 2009, when she was 96. A retrospective of her work from 1940’s till her last years of work. The project will be accompanied by the documentary «In the Street» she made with James Agee in 1945.
