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Builder Levy
Builder Levy

Builder Levy

Country: United States

New Yorker Builder Levy has been photographing America and her inhabitants for the past 50 years. His social consciousness took him to significant areas of our country during tumultuous times. His commitment to aesthetically [or artistically] documenting the world around him earned him the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. Levy's work is in more than 50 public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, and La Bibliotheque Nationale. He is also the author of two published photographic books.

Source: Arnika Dawkins Gallery


Intertwining social documentary, art and street photography, Builder Levy has been making photographs as objects of art that celebrate the human spirit for almost fifty years. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (’08), an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship (‘04), a Furthermore Grant (‘03), Puffin Foundation Grant (‘01), and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship in Photography (‘82), and two commissions from the Appalachian College Association (’95 and ‘02).

Levy’s two books are Images of Appalachian Coalfields, Temple Univ. Press, with a foreword by Cornell Capa, and Builder Levy Photographer, A.R.T. Press, with an introduction by noted photo historian Naomi Rosenblum. Levy has exhibited in more than 200 shows, including more than 50 one-person exhibitions in New York City, throughout the United States and around the world. In the Fall 2011, he is included in the exhibits Coal + Ice, curated by Susan Meiselas & Jeroen de Vries, a project of the Asia Society, at the Three Shadows Art Centre in Beijing; Posing Beauty, curated by Deborah Willis at Fisher Museum of Art, USC, Los Angeles (9/11-12/11); Photo Folio at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (10/11-1/12); at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery (Black & White and Color), (with 13 photographs) (10/1-10/29/11) in conjunction with Atlanta Celebrates Photography; and Mirrors and Reflections: A Group Show, curated by Evelyne Z. Daitz with co-curator Alison Bradley at the Robert Anderson Gallery at 24 West 57th Street, New York (11/17/11-1/7/12) The High Museum of Art included Levy’s photographs in the historic exhibition, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968 (and the accompanying eponymous book/catalogue), curated by Julian Cox. It opened at the High Museum of Art in 2008, and traveled for two years to museums in D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. The Rubin Museum of Art in NYC featured 14 of Levy’s photographs in the show Mongolia: Beyond Chinggis Khan, 11/06-4/07.

Levy’s work is in more than 50 public collections in the US and around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, and La Bibliotheque Nationale. His photographs are featured in more than 25 books including, Harlem, A Century in Images, Studio Museum of Harlem, Skira/Rizzoli 2010, Freedom, Phaidon Press, 100 New York Photographers, Schiffer Press ‘09, Deborah Willis’ Posing Beauty, Norton Press, ‘09, Coal Country, Sierra Club Books, ’09, and Road To Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968. He was the featured artist (with 22 photos) in Appalachian Heritage, (Spring 2010). His subjects include inner-city New York City where he was a NYC teacher of at-risk adolescents for 35 years; coalfield Appalachia (spanning more than 40 years), civil rights and peace demonstrations (in the 1960s), Mongolia and other developing nations. He is completing a new book, Appalachia USA.

Source: builderlevy.com

Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Appalachia USA: Photographs, 1968-2009
Appalachia USA: Photographs, 1968-2009
Builder Levy
Builder Levy: Photographer
Builder Levy: Photographer
Builder Levy
Builder Levy: Images of Appalachian Coalfields
Builder Levy: Images of Appalachian Coalfields
Builder Levy, Helen Matthews Lewis, Cornell Capa

Galleries

Arnika Dawkins Gallery

Peter Fetterman Gallery

Website

www.builderlevy.com

 

Builder Levy's Video

Selected Books

Appalachia USA: Photographs, 1968-2009
Appalachia USA: Photographs, 1968-2009
Builder Levy
Builder Levy: Photographer
Builder Levy: Photographer
Builder Levy
Builder Levy: Images of Appalachian Coalfields
Builder Levy: Images of Appalachian Coalfields
Builder Levy, Helen Matthews Lewis, Cornell Capa

Inspiring Portfolios

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An-My Lê
An-My Lê
Vietnam / United States
1960
An-My Lê is a Vietnamese American photographer and professor at Bard College. She is a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Award (2007), and the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Fellowship (2010). Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, and now lives and works in New York. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. She studied biology at Stanford University, receiving her BA in 1981 and her MA in 1985. She attended Yale School of Art, receiving her MFA in 1993. Her book Small Wars was published in 2005. In November 2014, her second book, Events Ashore, was published by Aperture. Events Ashore depicts a 9-year exploration of the US Navy working throughout the world. The project began when the artist was invited to photograph US naval ships preparing for deployment to Iraq, the first in a series of visits to battleships, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, and scientific missions in the Arctic and Antarctic.Source: Wikipedia In 1994 An-My Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time and began making a series of photographs informed by her own memories and by the stories and perceptions of her family. Since then her photographs and films have addressed the impact of war both environmentally and culturally. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures capture the disjunction between the natural landscape and the intervention of soldiers and machines meant for destruction. Projects include Viêt Nam (1994–98), in which Lê's memories of a war-torn countryside are reconciled with the contemporary landscape; Small Wars (1999–2002), in which Lê photographed and participated in Vietnam War reenactments in Virginia; and 29 Palms (2003–04) in which United States Marines preparing for deployment playact scenarios in a virtual Middle East in the California desert.Source: Guggenheim
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
Finland
1948
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a Finnish photographer who has worked in Britain since the 1960s. She was born in Myllykoski, municipality of Sippola (from 1975 part of the town of Anjalankoski, from 2009 part of the town of Kouvola), Finland in 1948. Konttinen became interested in photography at the age of 12 and was a member of a photography group in a nearby town. Intending to pursue photography as a career, she was apprenticed to a fashion photographer in Helsinki for a year. Konttinen studied photography in London in the 1960s, and cofounded the Amber Collective, which moved to the northeast of England in 1969. From 1969 Konttinen lived in Byker, and for seven years photographed and interviewed the residents of this area of terraced houses until her own house was demolished. She continued to work there for some time afterward. This resulted in the book Byker, which in David Alan Mellor's words "bore witness to her intimate embeddedness in the locality". In 1980 she became the first photographer since the Cultural Revolution to have her work exhibited by the British Council in China. Konttinen's next project was a study of girls attending dance schools in North Shields, their mothers, and the schools. The book Step by Step came from this. The book was an influence for the film Billy Elliot. Three years of photographing the beach between Seaham and Hartlepool resulted in the series Coal Coast. Konttinen later returned to Byker and photographed its new residents in colour.Source: Wikipedia Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a photographer and filmmaker, best known for her work documenting working-class life in North East England. She is also co-founder of the Amber Film and Photography Collective, based in Newcastle Upon Tyne and the Side Gallery, dedicated to socially engaged documentary photography. Her documentation of Byker, the close-knit community of Newcastle, led to national recognition as a key photographic and filmic account of the rich working-class culture on the eve of its destruction. In 2003-09 she returned to the Byker Wall Estate that came to replace the original community, with her Byker Revisited/Today I’m With You book and film. Konttinen’s other long-term projects include Step by Step/Keeping Time, Hoppings, Writing in the Sand, Letters to Katja and the Coal Coast/Song For Billy. In 2011 her photography was inscribed in the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register. She has exhibited widely, with her works held in multiple collections including the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The New York Public Library, Tate Modern, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the AmberSide Collection Trust, Newcastle.Source: Artimage
Robert S Johnson
Robert S Johnson
United States
1953
Robert S Johnson was born and raised on the grounds of the Boston State Hospital which was founded in 1839 under the name "Boston Lunatic Hospital". He returned to work on the locked wards for his gap year and for summers while in college. The first image he remembers taking was of a bear climbing on the family car in Yellowstone Park. The adults were frozen but he grabbed his mom’s Brownie and shot away. After five careers, ranging from Artistic Director of THECO, a theater company, to Regional Vice President of a for-profit, after-school education company, he turned to photography fulltime in 2008. He lives in New York City and Wellfleet MA with his wife, Katherine, and their son, Asher, a (very recent) 2018 graduate of Smith College.
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