Steidl New York Archive / Color

This revelatory book brings together more than 100 of Helen Levitt’s color photographs, combining iconic images with previously unpublished work in a large format that rivals the scale of her original prints. While Levitt is widely celebrated for her pioneering street photography in black and white, this book deepens our understanding of her compelling color legacy. Levitt began taking street photographs in black and white in the 1930s and ’40s, making an experimental shift to color in 1959—immersing herself in the luminous, varied spectrum that Kodachrome film made possible. She photographed not the glamour of her native New York, but the locals of Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side and the Midtown red-light districts: hives of everyday activity that brought together diverse shoppers and shopkeepers, delivery men, street food vendors, mothers, fathers, and—central to her work—children. Regardless of which intimate moments of the street Levitt depicted, she used color in masterful, elegant ways: to emphasize unexpected details; to negotiate space; to activate scenes by encouraging the viewer’s eye to roam, to resist settling on any single area. While Levitt exhibited her color photography as early as 1974 in an unprecedented slideshow at the Museum of Modern Art, the show went largely unnoticed and only in 2005 was her color work first published in book form. Now, New York Archive / Color—complementing Levitt’s New York Archive / Black & White, also published by Steidl this season—provides a long-overdue reassessment of her chromatic vision and influence within the New Color Photography of the 1970s.