Friday, February 27, 2026

Helen Levitt

Fundación Mapfre

Barcelona, September 2025 – February 2026

Madrid, February – May 2026

Helen Levitt,
New York , c. 1940
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy of Zander Galerie, Cologne

https://documentacion.fundacionmapfre.org/documentacion/publico/es/media/group/1128334.do

A comprehensive overview of the career of Helen Levitt (1913-2009), one of the first women to forge a professional path in photography, considered one of the great masters of street photography for her skill in capturing the spontaneity of urban life. The exhibition, the most ambitious ever presented in Spain, brings together more than two hundred photographs and is organized into nine sections that cover her entire career. In addition to the self-guided tour, the virtual tour also offers the option of a guided visit, with explanations of some of the most important works.

Dedicated full-time to her artistic activities, the photographer Helen Levitt (New York, 1913-2009) did not begin to gain public recognition until relatively late in life. Although her name has always been associated with "street photography," as it was precisely the streets of her native city that provided the context for the production of her images, throughout her career Levitt made forays into film, visited other countries such as Mexico, and also focused on colour photography. Her images, almost invariably ambiguous and mysterious although not necessarily at first glance, are also characterised by their spontaneity, warmth and sensitivity.

The movements and gestures of the figures captured by her lens and the communication between them transcend that inclination to "photograph children" which many critics pointed out after her first exhibition at the MoMA in 1943, entitled Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children. New York, c. 1940 Levitt's work as a whole goes far beyond the latter aspect, revealing her acceptance of the pleasures, terrors and complexity of existence at all ages, traits often overlooked by the viewer when immersed in the harsh reality of the urban landscape.

The exhibition, the first to be devoted to the artist on the basis of the entirety of her work and archives, which have only recently become available for study, offers a broad overview of Levitt’s career through nine sections and around 220 photographs. It includes previously unexhibited images, as well as work produced in Mexico in 1941 and a large proportion of the artist’s work in colour, which she explored from the 1950s onward. It also features her film In the Street, directed by Levitt in collaboration with Janice Loeb and James Agee, and a projection of her colour slides. New York, c. 1942 B

orn in Brooklyn to a Russian-Jewish family, Helen Levitt dropped out of high school early and began her photography training in a Bronx studio. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, she pursued independent photography, capturing everyday life in New York neighbourhoods between 1938 and 1942. Her first solo exhibition was at the MoMA in 1943. She also experimented with film, making In the Street, and with colour photography, which gained her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. Levitt continued to work intermittently, exploring new settings such as the subway and rural areas. Her creative output is recognised for its ability to capture moments of human connection in complex urban environments. New York, c. 1945

KEY THEMES

Enigmatic photographs. Helen Levitt's images possess a mysterious quality that transforms them into true visual enigmas. Her unique and highly perceptive gaze turns everyday scenes into compositions that are hard to define, creating an immediate connection with the viewer even when there is no clear narrative to explain them. A pioneer with her own voice. Helen Levitt was one of the first women to make her way in the world of photography, especially in the field of street photography. She always avoided constructing an explicit narrative in her images and preferred not to talk about them. Far from diminishing its value, that decision is one of the key traits that make her work so interesting. Despite this characteristic of reserve, Levitt’s photographs connect with the viewer through the universal emotions they convey.

Monday, February 23, 2026

The Secret Paris of the 1930s: Vintage Photographs by Brassaï

Drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths, having taken pictures for my ‘voyage to the end of night’ from the outside, I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the façades, in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, and [sexual] inverts.
-- Brassaï

Fille de Montmartre playing Russian billiards, Blvd Rochechouart, 1932-33

Streetwalker near the Place d'Italie, Paris, 1932

The ballerina Ludmilla Tcherina backstage, Sarah Bernhard Theater, 1945

Lovers, Bal Musette des Quatre Saisons, rue de Lappe, ca. 1932

“Le Balajo” dance hall, rue de Lappe, 1936

Madame Bijou in the Bar de la Lune, Montmartre, 1932

Transmutation: Temptation of Saint-Antoine. 1934-35

Chez Suzy (fille de joie in mirror), 1932

Early 20th century Paris was the setting for one of the great flowerings that have periodically punctuated the history of photography. As with painting and sculpture, ambitious young photographers from around the world flocked to between-the-wars Paris, where they formed a fertile artistic milieu. Among them was the Transylvanian-born Brassaï, whose evocative, inky-black, and very rare, vintage photographs of night-time Paris from a private collection are assembled into this unforgettable exhibition.

How appropriate that Brassaï – the most acclaimed artist ever to emerge from Transylvania – is best known for his photographs of Paris’s notorious creatures of the night! After attending art school in Berlin, Brassaï moved to Paris in 1924, and stayed for good. Born Gyula Halász, he adopted the nom de plume Brassaï from his birthplace, Brasso, a Hungarian (now Romanian) town in the Transylvanian region. A gifted sculptor and sketch artist, he learned the technical aspects of photography from his fellow Hungarian-in-Paris André Kertész, but the two artists’ subject matter could not have been more different. In contrast to Kertész’s cool compositions and meticulous still lifes, Brassaï focused on Paris’s crepuscular demimonde, which he explored compulsively from the first moment of his arrival. Sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by friends like the writers Henry Miller or Jacques Prévert, Brassaï witnessed aspects of Parisian night life that the cerebral Kertész would never imagine.

DOROTHEA LANGE: Life Work

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum

Feb. 21 – May 3, 2026

This exhibit offers a comprehensive career retrospective of original lifetime prints by the legendary documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Highlights include oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression, such as White Angel Breadline, Migratory Farm Worker and, most famously, Migrant Mother – an emblematic picture that came to personify pride and resilience in the face of abject poverty in 1930s America.

Lange herself knew adversity early in life. At age 7, she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age 12, her father disappeared, leaving an impoverished household behind. Every day she would ride the ferry with her mother from Hoboken to Lower Manhattan to a roiling working-class neighborhood teeming with immigrants. During that period, Lange talked her way into photo courses with a range of teachers as diverse as Arnold Genthe and Clarence White.

In 1918 she moved to San Francisco, where she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband.

She soon opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s professional class and monied elite. But with the crash of 1929, she found her true calling, as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence.

Her immortal portraits seared these faces of the Depression era into America’s consciousness.Featuring 50 remarkable photographs, this exhibition traces Lange’s dynamic life and career, including many of her renowned images of the Great Depression. Best known for her powerful images of displaced families and migrant workers, Lange captured the human toll of economic hardship with sensitivity and empathy. Her photographs have become icons of American cultural history, documenting the suffering of the Great Depression and the striking landscapes of the 1930s Dust Bowl era.

In addition to her renowned Depression-era work, the exhibition highlights lesser-known aspects of Lange’s career, including images of her family life, artistic collaborations with photographers such as Ansel Adams, and projects undertaken during her travels throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s.

Lange began her photography career in San Francisco, operating a successful portrait studio from 1919 until the mid-1930s. In 1933, she first documented the breadlines and the hardship visible in the streets. The circulation of Lange’s street photographs led to her employment with the Resettlement Administration and then the Farm Security Administration (FSA), documenting the struggles of farm workers in rural America. Lange’s compelling work raised public awareness of the dire need for federal assistance, garnering support for congressional funding of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.

All works in the exhibition are drawn from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibition has been organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936

Monday, January 19, 2026

Gordon Parks: “Homeward to the Prairie I Come”

One of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was also renowned as a poet, filmmaker, author, composer, and activist. He is best known for his photojournalism from the 1940s to the 1970s that documented American life and culture, particularly the experiences of African Americans and the Civil Rights Movement.

“Presenting this important work by Gordon Parks not only affirms our commitment to world-class exhibitions but also continues our ongoing work to engage with our broader community and partners,” says Philbrook CEO and President Megan Whittaker Nesbit.

Highlighting the life and career of Parks, Homeward to the Prairie I Come showcases poetry and prose by the artist alongside images from his gift to Kansas State University that convey a wide range of artistic ideas. The exhibition features more than seventy photographs, including images captured by Parks for photojournalism and fashion assignments at LIFE magazine, striking portraits of prominent figures such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, as well as examples of his experimental photography.

“Visitors to the exhibition will experience the multifaceted work of Parks and discover how the visionary artist used different forms of art to tell deeply human stories and highlight social injustice,” says Guest Exhibition Curator Jessica Provencher. “Whether you are drawn to photography, poetry, or film, you’ll find powerful images and stories in this exhibition that speak to both the pain and beauty of the human experience—and to Parks’ lasting impact.”

Alongside the works on loan from the Beach Museum will be a recent Philbrook acquisition, Park’s iconic 1942 photograph, American Gothic, a reimagining of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of the same name.

This exhibition features photographs selected and donated by Parks to Kansas State University in 1973. Becoming a kind of self-portrait, the gift expresses wide-ranging artistic ideas beyond documentary photography. “Homeward to the prairie I come” is the first line of a poem that Kansas native Gordon Parks wrote in 1984. It was part of a commission from a local newspaper for a special insert to celebrate its centennial. Parks visited Manhattan, Kansas, in 1984 for the commission and returned in 1985 for a second residency. These activities exemplify the many relationships Parks forged in his home state during his career.

This exhibition features photographs selected and donated by Parks to Kansas State University in 1973 after he received an honorary doctorate degree there. The gift includes not only images from stories published in LIFE magazine, such as those of the da Silva and Fontenelle families, but also experimental ones, such as the multiple exposure The Stranger and Table in Snow, a study in subtle variations of white.

In addition, Parks created new narratives and thematic groups from such assignments as Paris fashions, Fort Scott Revisited, and Muhammad Ali to reflect his thoughts on photography as a fine art medium and his work vis à vis celebrated paintings and sculptures. As a result, the gift becomes a kind of self-portrait expressing Parks’ wide-ranging artistic ideas beyond documentary photography.

Most significantly, the photographs instigate cultural change by challenging viewers to imagine a more inclusive culture than the one they know: a world where Black skin represents ideal beauty, where an African American athlete embodies the exemplary hero, and where an artist of African heritage has a place within the lineage of excellent artists in Western art history.

An open-access digital catalog accompanies this exhibition.

Sunday, January 18, 2026

Richard Avedon: Facing West

Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London

January 15–March 14, 2026

Opening at the Grosvenor Hill gallery in London on January 15, 2026, Facing West is curated by the photographer’s granddaughter, Caroline Avedon. In the American West, an extended series commissioned by and first exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2025. At the time of its debut in 1985, Avedon was well known for fashion photography, portraits of people in power, and his work with the civil rights movement. These images, which picture the heart and soul of hardscrabble, working-class America, represented a significant new development in his work.

Avedon spent five years, from 1979 to 1984, traveling to twenty-one US states. He conducted more than a thousand sittings, finally producing 126 editioned images, 21 of which are on view in London. With the help of introductions made by an assistant, Laura Wilson, he selected a wide variety of people to photograph, representing a range of professions and rural pastimes, and depicting oftenoverlooked subjects from drifters to coal miners.

Regarding his portraits as subjective interpretations (“All photographs are accurate,” he stated. “None of them is the truth”), Avedon often confronted suffering but succeeded in conveying the hidden strength of his subjects, instilling the project with a sense of hope. Seeking human connection, he stood outdoors and next to the camera to engage with his subjects who, in a departure from the conventions of series portraiture, he also named and defined, resisting both generalization and idealization.

Using an 8 × 10 Deardorff camera, natural light, and scant props, Avedon photographed his sitters against a white backdrop, retaining the black border from the film negative edge to emphasize the images’ absence of compositional manipulation. He also explored new methods of presentation, mounting the prints on aluminum.

Caroline Avedon’s selection of images moves from darkness to light—from hardship and labor to youth and hope—and highlights some lesser-known shots to emphasize a diversity of experience for a new generation.

Among the works’ subjects are coal miner James Story, whom Avedon compared to Saint Sebastian for his embodiment of both strength and innocence, and Richard Wheatcroft, a rancher from Jordan, Montana, whom Avedon photographed twice (in 1981 and 1983), and with whom he developed a friendship. In a diptych of Wheatcroft, the subject appears at first glance to have barely changed in the two years between shoots, though closer inspection reveals the subtle wear of intervening life experience on his stance, clothing, and face.

Inspired by Avedon’s method of emotional storytelling through sequence and contrast, the curator also establishes thematic pairings throughout the exhibition, creating narrative links and renewing a dialogue around identity, class, and the complexities of the American experience.

Avedon’s In the American West book was the focus of an exhibition at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 2025, marking the publication’s fortieth anniversary; the exhibition will travel to additional venues in 2026–27. To commemorate the milestone, Abrams has also released a special reprint of thebook.

To read Avedon's biography and see many.many more images go to: https://gagosian.com/artists/richard-avedon/

IMAGES

Copyright 1985 by Richard Avedon Inc. \ All rights reserved. \ This photograph was printed in 1985. \ James Story, coal miner \ Somerset, Colorado, 12/18/79 \ This photograph was printed for and first exhibited \ at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas \ September 14 - November 17, 1985.

Richard Avedon
Charlene Van Tighem, physical therapist, Augusta, Montana, June 26, 1983
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy Gagosian
Richard Avedon
Unidentified migrant worker, Eagle Pass, Texas, December 10, 1979
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy Gagosian
Richard Avedon
Robert Dixon, meat packer, Aurora, Colorado, June 15, 1983
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy Gagosian
Richard Avedon
Annette Gonzales, housewife, and her sister Lydia Ranck, secretary, Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico, Easter Sunday, April 6, 1980
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy Gagosian
Richard Avedon
Freida Kleinsasser, thirteen-year-old, Hutterite colony, Harlowton, Montana, June 23, 1983
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy Gagosian
Richard Avedon
Joe Dobosz, uranium miner, Church Rock, New Mexico, June 13, 1979
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy Gagosian
Richard Avedon
Roger Tims, Jim Duncan, Leonard Markley and Don Belak, coal miners, Reliance, Wyoming, August 29, 1979
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy Gagosian