The earliest photographs included in this collection were captured in 1959, the same year Helen Levitt received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled her to actively pursue color photography. During that time, color photography was quite costly and inaccessible for most artists. These works exemplify Levitt’s remarkable ability to capture expressive gestures, a theme she carried over from her black and white photographs, establishing herself as one of the pioneers who expanded the art of street photography into the realm of color.
Levitt’s color photography possesses its own distinct character, intimately connected yet separate from her black and white work. Her color images vividly depict the lively and diverse melting pot of New York City, often introducing playful interludes through vibrant splashes of color in the urban surroundings. Many of these pictures capture unexpected collisions of incongruous elements, often resulting in humorous effects.
In the early 1970s, Levitt’s apartment in Greenwich Village was burglarized, resulting in the theft of the majority of her color transparencies from 1959 to 1960. Nevertheless, she continued actively photographing in color, and in 1974, the renowned photography curator John Szarkowski curated MoMA’s first solo exhibition dedicated to color photography, showcasing Levitt’s work and cementing her position as one of the early and serious practitioners of the medium. Due to the high cost of color printing at the time, the works were presented in the form of a slideshow.
Several years later, in the early 2000s, Levitt experienced a resurgence of interest in her work from publishers and curators, coinciding with advancements in digital color printing. Between 2001 and 2008, a series of new books featuring her photographs were published. Levitt worked closely with printers to scan her original transparencies and negatives, meticulously proofing the prints that were used to create color separations for these new publications.
One of these books, titled Slideshow (powerHouse Books, 2004), exclusively focused on Levitt’s color photographs, expanding upon the selections from her 1974 solo exhibition at MoMA. The printer’s proofs provided Levitt with the opportunity to see her color images printed with a vividness and saturation that were previously unattainable, even with high-quality dye transfer prints typically found in museums. As a result, these prints allowed Levitt to witness certain images printed for the first time, revealing familiar scenes in new and more vibrant ways.
In 2008, Levitt was honored with the Spectrum International Photography Prize, coinciding with a retrospective exhibition at Germany’s Sprengel Museum Hannover and the publication of a corresponding book. Both the exhibition and the book showcased many previously unseen color photographs, offering a comprehensive view of Levitt’s artistic practice. This timely exploration occurred just a year before her passing in 2009.

Laurence Miller Gallery is delighted to present a unique portfolio of twelve color photographs by Helen Levitt in a collection titled “BODY LANGUAGE.” These prints, reflecting the later phase of her career, celebrate Levitt’s exceptional talent for capturing the rich spectrum of communication conveyed through gesture and movement. From moments of unexpected tenderness to bursts of spontaneous humor, these vivid color prints showcase Levitt’s mastery of her craft.

About the Author

Helen Levitt’s playful and poetic photographs, made over the course of sixty years on the streets of New York City, have delighted generations of photographers, students, collectors, curators, and lovers of art in general. The New York Times described her as: “a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York”. Throughout her long career, Helen Levitt’s photographs have consistently reflected her poetic vision, humor, and inventiveness as much as they have honestly portrayed her subjects—men, women, and children acting out a daily drama on the sidewalks and stoops of New York City’s tenements.
She shot and edited the film In the Street with Janice Loeb and James Agee, providing a moving portrait of her still photography. Levitt’s first major museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and a second solo show, of color work only, was held there in 1974. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at several museums: first in 1991, jointly at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; in 1997 at the International Center for Photography in New York; and in 2001 at the Centre National la Photographie in Paris.
In 2007 “Helen Levitt: Un Art de l’accident poetique” opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris; in 2008, the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany chose Ms. Levitt as the recipient for the Spectrum International Photography Prize which was accompanied by a major retrospective; and FOAM Museum Amsterdam, mounted another major retrospective in October, 2008. She was a 2008 recipient of the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts.

Helen Levitt: Body Language
Online Exhibition
May 18 – July 29, 2023
Laurence Miller Gallery
www.laurencemillergallery.com