HELEN LEVITT (1913–2009)

'Great art is insistent. It demands a response: unease, awe, relief. And it calls for contemplation. It resonates. The earliest mark making strikes me as a spiritual response to living, a primitive attempt to find or to create meaning.
Albert Einstein got it right: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.’
If you are given only a part of the information, if something is withheld or hidden, then you, the viewer, have to come to the picture and imagine and create for yourself a truth for what is there. You invest your own soul and experience. You become a collaborator. Seeing becomes unique, personal and charged with life.
A collector also wonders, when initially encountering a work, will it sustain viewing after viewing? Will it reveal itself differently over time? Will he want to look at it over and over? These are considerations, although if the initial impact of a photograph is powerfully and personally charged, the work will hold up.' – W.M. Hunt