A Way of Seeing.

Helen Levitt first became aware of photography's potential when she visited the exhibition 'Documentary and Anti-Graphic: Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson Walker Evans & Manuel Alvarez-Bravo,' organised by Julien Levy at his New York gallery in 1935. Evans became a mentor to Levitt, teaching her various techniques to enable her to photograph in the street so that her subjects would not notice her. Levitt returned the favour by accompanying Evans on the subway when he took the photographs, which were later published as Many Are Called (1965). Evans also introduced Levitt to his then-collaborator, James Agee, who would become her collaborator and strongest admirer.

This book was born in 1945 when Levitt and Agee worked together on In the Street, a documentary film shot in Harlem. The photographs were mostly taken on the streets of Harlem, with some on the Lower East Side in the late 1930s and 1940s, and Agee wrote the text in the mid-1940s. Publication was planned for 1946 by Reynolds and Hitchcock but postponed and cancelled following the death of one of the firm's partners. The project remained unrealised until 1965, ten years after Agee's death when The Viking Press published a Way of Seeing. In his essay Agee writes:

'At least a dozen of Helen Levitt's photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and, in a gentle and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.'

First edition; oblong 8vo (190 x 228 mm); black & white photographs printed in gravure, design by Marvin Hoshino; black cloth-covered boards, titles stamped in white on spine and front, photo-illustrated dust-jacket, rubbed, creasing to top and bottom edges, light wear to head of spine, a very good copy; [viii], 78, [2]pp.

Regards sur un siècle de photographie à travers Le Livre, 134; The Book of 101 Books pp178–9; The Photobook A History, I pp252–3; The Open Book pp252–3; 802 photo books from the Auer collection p447; What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843-1999 pp167-168.