A Way of Seeing

Oblong 8vo (224 x 189 mm), pp.[viii], 8, [65], 73-78, [2] blank. 51 black-and-white photographs printed in gravure. Original black cloth, spine and upper side lettered in white; very slight sunning at top edge towards spine, mark from a paper clip affecting 10 pages towards the rear. Original black-and-white photo-illustrated dust-jacket; price-clipped , head and foot of spine rubbed, short closed tear and light creasing to lower panel, a couple of nicks and rubbing to extremities.

First edition. This collaboration was born in 1945 when Levitt and Agee worked together on In the Street, a documentary film shot in Harlem. The photographs were taken on the streets of Harlem and the Lower East Side in the late 1930s and 1940s. The project remained unpublished until the present edition. Agee writes ‘Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know… an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and, in a gentle and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.’

Roth, A., The Book of 101 Books, pp.178-9; Parr, M. and Badger, G., The Photobook: A History Vol.I, pp.252-3; Roth, A. et al. Open Book, pp. 214-5. Auer, M. and M., 802 photo books, p.447.