sequent population explosion.Saudades Do Brasil
thus acts as a warning, a retrospective on several
cultures nearing extinction.
Le ́vi-Strauss’s contributions as an anthropolo-
gist and philosopher, however, have had a greater
impact on contemporary art and photography than
his use of the medium. His ideas have informed
Structuralism, which became an essential ingredi-
ent in the development of photographic theory in
the 1960s and 1970s. Various observations he
made, such as ‘‘the decision that everything must
be taken into account facilitates the creation of an
image bank,’’ have been starting points for numer-
ous contemporary artists, including the seminal
sculptor and theorist Robert Smithson.
AndrewHoweSeealso:Barthes, Roland; Deconstruction; Discur-
sive Spaces; Documentary Photography; Image The-
ory: Ideology; Representation and Gender; Social
Representation; Visual Anthropology
Biography
Born in Brussels, Belgium, 28 November 1908. Attended the
University of Paris, 1927–1932 (studied philosophy and
law). Taught secondary school; member of Sartre’s intel-
lectual circle; Professor of Sociology at University of Sao
Paulo,1934–1937;visitingprofessorattheNewSchoolfor
Social Research, New York, 1941–1945; Director of Stu-
dies at E ́cole Pratiquedes Hautes, University of Paris,
1950–1974;appointedChairofSocialAnthropology,Col-
lege de France, 1959.Selected Works
Le ́vi-Strauss, Claude.Saudades Do Brasil: A Photographic
Memoir. Trans. Sylvia Modelski. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1995.
———.Structural Anthropology, vol 2. Trans. Monique
Layton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
———.Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson.
New York: Basic Books, 1963.
———.Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John Russell. New York:
Basic Books, 1961.
———.The View From Afar. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel
and Phoebe Hoss. New York: Basic Books, 1983.HELEN LEVITT
American
Perhaps best known for her photographs of chil-
dren at play on the street corners of New York City,
Helen Levitt also made a career out of documenting
the social conditions of urban America. Her photo-
graphs are striking, dramatic events that tell stories
through their captured moments, weaving context
into her subjects deftly and subtly. Her collabora-
tion with author James Agee produced some of the
mid-century’s most striking documentary films, and
one book,A Way of Seeing. Agee himself admired
Levitt’s photos very much, describing them as
almost a work of literature:
At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to
me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as
any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and
coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body,
as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of
the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a
way of seeing, and in a gentle and wholly unpretentious
way, a major poetic work.Levitt was born in 1918 in the city that she would
later document so passionately. After leaving an
unsatisfactory stint at school, Levitt began to work
for a commercial photographer and teach herself the
basic photographic techniques. But, in 1935, Levitt
became so impressed by the images of Henri Cartier-
Bresson at the exhibitionDocumentary and Anti-
Graphic (which also included work by Walker
Evans and Manual A ́lvarez Bravo) that she bought
the same Leica camera that Cartier-Bresson photo-
graphed with. Soon after, Helen Levitt met Cartier-
Bresson and began to do simple pictures with the
basic, 35-mm camera. Levitt’s subjects were mostly
poor children in New York City, and through tech-
niques she learned from Cartier-Bresson, she cap-
tured them unobtrusively. With her right-angle
viewfinder, Levitt remained as much on the periph-
ery of her scenes as possible. Those early pictures,
which would have been considered in the same tradi-
tion of ‘‘street photographs’’ by Walker Evans and
Ben Shahn, were instrumental in creating Helen
Levitt’s style. Evans was, in particular, a huge influ-LEVITT, HELEN