If I could only have three books on Levitt, I would have to choose this new one, but also the small, wonderful Grossmont College catalogue, Helen Levitt: Color Photographs (1980) with its fine, tight selection of color work (only 23 images are reproduced here, all of them perfect). It is the smaller, more modest sister to the new book, sharing a muted green cover.

The third book would have to be A Way of Seeing, first edition (1965). Even though there are two additional and expanded editions of this book (1981 and 1990), to me the first is the best (though based on Maria Morris Hambourg's text in the 1991 book Helen Levitt (SFMoMA), Levitt herself would perhaps disagree.)

In truth, the choice of which edition of A Way of Seeing to own is an easy one — all of them. They each speak of a different time, and they each add to our understanding of Levitt, her work, and the distinctions that occur between books, even when they are nominally the same book.

In looking now at just the first and third editions (lack of space allows no discussion of the second, which is essentially like the third), some interesting and significant differences are obvious, even though the core photographs and text by Agee are the same. First, they are different sizes. The first edition is small, prayer-like, bound in black cloth, and in its intimate form and physical weight calls to mind Walker Evan's American Photographs. This comes as no surprise of course, since Levitt worked with Evans during 1938, the year American Photographs was published. And certainly then (but not now) photography books were presented as fairly