Chromogenic print by Ethan Levitas, This is Just to Say #51

Print size: 28" x 28"
Train: 23 3/4" x 7.5"

Ethan Levitas
(source: polkagalerie.com) Ethan Levitas was born in New York City in 1971. After completing his studies in Government at Cornell University, Levitas spent five years in Japan where he started working in photography.

His primary oeuvre is comprised of four major series created over the last decade: Untitled/ This Is Just To Say (2004-2009), In Advance of a Broken Arm (2009-2010), Ten-Year Study (2011), and a fourth series Photographs in 3A, currently in progress.

Ethan Levitas explores the implications of the photographic act as intervention and the photograph as event that refigures the assignments of place, purpose, and meaning. He has grounded his practice in the strategic recognition of his role as participant in relation to the subjects/objects in front of his lens. Levitas’ conception of this relationship is the subject of his work and, to varying degree, is contextualized in expressions of civic engagement and dissent. In doing so, Levitas offers a new paradigm for contemporary street photography. Through his action, Levitas moves beyond observation alone to create, navigate and articu- late relational events that refigure public space, subvert the logic of legitimization and interrogate constructed meaning, by and through the photograph.

Dealing with the photograph at its essence, his work is at once a meditation on the conditions of photography’s own existence, the relativism implicit in that condition, and an expan- sion of the possibilities inhering in the medium.

A master technician and printmaker, Ethan Levitas lives and works in New York City. Along his four major projects, he collaborates frequently with The New Yorker, which has for years commissioned him as a portraitist in subjects of cultural criticism.

Good condition overall