Helen Levitt - Photographs from the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation New York Thursday, April 4, 2024 | Phillips
  • “Levitt and Evans shared a profound interest in the appearance of modern citizens – how metropolitan life throws us into close and brief proximity with strangers. . . [the subway] was a space of chance encounters, where the random flow of people is temporarily sorted by the ordered rows of seats.”
    —David Campany
    In the 1930s, as the young Helen Levitt was developing her photographic practice, she reached out to Walker Evans, whose work she admired. The two became friends and began photographing together, and when Evans started photographing in the New York City subways, Levitt frequently accompanied him. After a few such outings, Levitt began making her own images of passengers, such as the photograph offered here. While her subway photographs are less well-known than Evans’s, they are just as much a collective portrait of New York and inhabit an important place within Helen Levitt’s empathetic and perceptive documentation of the city and its people. In the 1970s, Levitt returned to the subways with her camera, making a significant body of work later published in the book, Manhattan Transit: The Subway Photographs of Helen Levitt (2017). 

    • Provenance

      Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

    • Exhibited

      Private Dramas, Public Dreams: The Street Photographs of Helen Levitt & Friends, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, 10 December 2013 – 8 June 2014
      Helen Levitt, Albertina Museum, Vienna, 12 October 2018 – 27 January 2019; Photographers’ Gallery, London, 15 October 2021 – 13 February 2022

    • Literature

      Albertina, Helen Levitt, p. 162

100

Subway Portrait (three women)

1938-1941
Gelatin silver print.
4 3/4 x 7 1/4 in. (12.1 x 18.4 cm)
Signed in pencil on the verso.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$7,000 - 9,000 

Sold for $7,620

Contact Specialist

Caroline Deck
Senior Specialist, Photographs
cdeck@phillips.com

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs from the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation

New York Auction 4 April 2024