A Way of Seeing. Photographs by Helen Levitt. Essay by James Agee. Viking Press, New York/Special Museum of Modern Art edition, 1965. 78 pp. Small oblong quarto. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 50 black-and-white reproductions.
Although most of the pictures in this book were taken by 1948, it did not appear until 1965. Writing in Roth, et. al., The Book of 101 Books, Vince Aletti refers to the images as "...an episodic montage--bleak, antic, poignant; sometimes melodramatic, often comic--at once suggestively narrative and as ephemeral as a passing glance." In The Photobook: A History, vol. 1 Martin Parr and Gerry Badger write, "Levitt's photographs are beautiful--major underrated works. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, she achieves a rare balancing act: her pictures have sentiment without being sentimental, always maintaining an objective distance...The casual observer of these pictures, dazzled by their poetry, could easily miss the harsher realities masked by the surface warmth and joie de vivre."
Fine-; moderate edge wear; otherwise tightly bound, unusually bright; $2.95 price sticker verso of front wrapper. |
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