Helen Levitt : In The Street

 

You must look and look, and look again. Helen Levitt’s artwork seems to spring up from such an imperative. A pioneer of street photography, Levitt worked her entire life in the same few locations: the most crowded and poorest neighborhoods of New York. She ventured into those streets, searching for the theater of everyday life, from the 1930s through the 1990s.
 
In the Street, a retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery, brings together key works from across the nearly seven decades of the photographer’s practice. Like many, I’ve always been mesmerized by Levitt’s 1930s and ’40s photographs of children playing in the streets, her best-known works. It seems fitting that the artist, a former art teacher, would photograph children’s chalk drawings left behind on walls and sidewalks. A Way of Seeing, her most celebrated photo book, opens with such curious drawings. 
 
Spanish Harlem and the Bronx were to Levitt as Paris’s flea markets were to the Surrealists: an inexhaustible source of wonder. Though Surrealism’s influence on Levitt is still awaiting a detailed study, evidence of this connection is abundant in her work. Look at any of her photographs, and you’ll almost certainly find hints of the uncanny or grotesque. People are often captured in awkward poses and puzzling gestures, bending over in strange positions so that they appear folded in half or amorphous. Streets and house facades seem transformed into stages and sets, and everyday activities are defamiliarized. Kids are portrayed in all their vulnerability and cruelty, playing a constant game on the threshold between the familiar and the unknown.
 
Among Levitt’s favorite subjects were children dressed up for Halloween. Their little faces covered by cheap paper masks, they inhabit a world of their own, unnoticed by grown-ups, as if they were ghosts.

 
“The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theater and a battleground.” The opening words of In the Street (1948), the experimental 16-minute documentary Levitt filmed, together with Janice Loeb and James Agee, on the streets where she took her photographs, could be used to sum-up her entire oeuvre.
 
  
Quite rightly, the film is included in the exhibition to stress the importance of the artist as a filmmaker. But while I understand its relevance — it anticipates cinéma vérité by almost a decade — I resent it in the way it kills some of the mystery behind Levitt’s photos. Watching her subjects moving and acting, made alive by the film camera, places those characters back into the realm of the mundane. Between Levitt’s static and moving images there’s the same substantial difference as that between reminiscing and experiencing a present event. Memories are always much more fun, because we get to edit the facts.       

 
Moving images were of the utmost importance to Levitt, so much so that from 1948 to the late 1950s she focused solely on filmmaking. She returned to photography to embrace color, at a time when black and white was deemed high art and color was looked down upon, as it was considered too close to advertising and fashion photography.
 
I don’t agree with the assessment of some art historians that Levitt’s color photographs are less compelling than her black and white ones. So I was pleased to find an entire floor of the exhibition dedicated to this less-known body of work.
 
Things had changed between the 1940s and late ’50s. The new variables of color photography demanded a new way of approaching Levitt’s subjects. And the advent of television and air conditioning had made children’s street games vanish. Yet Levitt’s eye for idiosyncrasies had remained the same. Color steps in to reinforce her penchant for singularity.
 
This is apparent in “New York City (Phone Booth)” (1980), a photograph of two kids squeezed in a phone booth dominated by a corpulent woman, or in “New York” (1980), of a little girl whose body seems impossibly contorted as she crouches between the curb and the back end of a green car.

 
Streets are, indeed, a theater and a battleground. You only have to look and look, and look again.
 
Helen Levitt: In The Streets continues at the Photographers’ Gallery (16-18 Ramillies Street, London, England) through February 13. The exhibition was curated by Walter Moser in collaboration with the Photographers’ Gallery Senior Curator Anna Dannemann.
 
A Photographer’s Portrait of the Theater of the Streets. By Franceso Dama. Hyperallergic, January 23, 2022

A retrospective of the US street photographer overturns conventional wisdom about her work, revealing it as political and human, as well as demonstrating her acute eye for the unusual and telling image
 
The American poet and cultural critic David Levi Strauss memorably described Helen Levitt as “maybe the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time”. That was in 1997, when Levitt was 84 and the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography in New York, the city in which she was born and made most of her work. Just over two decades on, and 12 years after her death, aged 95, in 2009, one could argue that little has changed in terms of her enigmatic status.
 
In a few weeks’ time, though, a more radical retrospective of Levitt’s work opens at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, having garnered much attention at the Arles photography festival in 2019. Titled In the Street and curated by Walter Moser, art historian and chief curator for photography at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, it suggests that almost everything you know about Helen Levitt, if indeed you know her at all, is wrong.
 
“For too long, there had been this received notion that Levitt’s photographs are lyrical and poetic, words that are too often applied lazily to the work of female photographers,” says Moser, who has spent years researching Levitt’s archive and, in the process, discovered many previously unseen images. “The truth is that Levitt was part of a highly intellectual cultural and political milieu in New York in the 1930s and her photography reflected her deep interest in surrealism, cinema, leftwing politics and the new ideas that were then emerging about the role of the body in art.”
 
Over two floors in the Photographers’ Gallery, which, incidentally, hosted Levitt’s first European exhibition in 1988, In the Street will trace her work in photography and film over 50 years of restless, inquisitive looking. The world she observed for most of that time was defiantly local – Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem – and yet recognisably universal in its capturing of the rhythms and gestures of children’s play and adults’ social interactions or solitary reveries. It is a dramatically different world to our own, the city streets teeming with children, who play with reckless abandon on stoops, waste grounds and vacant buildings.
 
Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her interest in photography blossomed when, aged 18, and having dropped out of high school, she began working in the darkroom of a commercial portrait photographer. Five years later, she bought a secondhand 35mm camera and, in his illuminating catalogue essay for her retrospective, Duncan Forbes asks us to picture “a diminutive, determined figure striding out, daringly at first, from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn across the city, transforming herself as a modern woman through her desire to see things differently”.
 
That desire would take a few years to change itself into a singular and subtle vision of the New York streets that remains an intriguing counterpoint to the more combative images made by the mostly male practitioners who followed in her wake in the 1960s and 70s and have all but defined the term “street photography”. But on the evidence Moser has gathered from her archives, which includes previously unseen photographs, contact sheets and short films, the term “street photographer” barely does Levitt justice.
 
 “She doesn’t just charge in like many male street photographers tend to,” says Siân Davey, a British documentary photographer whose quietly observational work explores the psychology of family, self and community. “Instead, in her pictures, you sense a particular quality of contact between her and her subjects. There is tenderness and an absence of ego that tells you what kind of person she was.”
 
Although Levitt was a quiet, solitary figure on the streets of New York, she was not a detached observer: rather, Moser says, she wanted her subjects to be aware of her presence and respond to it.
 
“What is evident from close attention to her contact sheets is that people are often presenting themselves in regard to the photographer opposite them,” he says. “They are knowing participants in her photographs – looking at her, smiling at her, flirting or striking a pose for her camera, though often she crops her photographs to take out these overt acknowledgments of her presence. On one level, her photography is essentially a performative exchange and that lends it a very contemporary resonance.”

 
Initially, though, it was her exposure to the social realism of the determinedly leftwing Workers Film and Photo League that shaped her early style. Through it, she absorbed the idea that photography was an agent of social change, while never quite committing herself to the communist cause as wholeheartedly as fellow photographer Lisette Model, who would later find herself on an FBI watchlist. “I decided I should take pictures of working-class people and contribute to the movements,” Levitt later said of that time. “And then I saw pictures of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and realised that photography could be an art – and that made me ambitious.”
 
She met Cartier-Bresson in 1935, introducing herself at a talk he gave to the Film and Photo League and subsequently accompanying him on a day-long shoot despite initially being intimidated into silence by his presence. “He was an intellectual, highly educated,” she later recalled. “I was a high-school dropout.”
 
Her participation in the Film and Photo League also exposed Levitt to the work of avant garde film-makers from Europe and Russia as well as surrealist ideas and radical developments in contemporary dance that, as Forbes puts it, elevated “an aesthetics of corporeal transfiguration through movement and drama”.
 
These contrasting formal influences – the realist and the poetic – were central to Levitt’s way of seeing, both in her photography and in her later embrace of film-making. As her style matured, her photographs of children seem almost choreographed in their capturing of the gestures and glances of play. And, though often joyous, they frequently have a darker undertone: the children engage in combat games and pose as gangsters in homage to the Hollywood films of the time. In one image, a child recoils as if he has just been slapped in the face by the adult looming over him. “There is a hint of darkness in her work, but it is never overt,” says Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery. “In her photographs, she presents the street as an almost theatrical landscape where the smallest interactions and gestures are incredibly resonant.”
 
In 1938, Levitt met another toweringly influential photographer, Walker Evans, whom she also befriended. Evans introduced her to the writer James Agee, with whom she would collaborate on her book, A Way of Seeing, and several intriguing films, including In the Street and The Quiet One, a documentary about an emotionally disturbed African American child.
 
For all that, Levitt was an intensely private individual who gave very few interviews in her lifetime. We know that she lived alone in her New York apartment with a cat called Binky and that she suffered from Ménière’s disease, which causes hearing problems and dizziness. In old age, she said, perhaps only half-jokingly, “I have felt wobbly all my life”. Her work, it seemed, centred her and she pursued it with single-minded determination.
 
 “For all the research I have done, her personality is a mystery to me,” says Moser. “I just could not figure her out. She was ambitious and knew what she wanted and she was certainly not shy, but to a great degree, she hid behind her work.”

 
She also expressed herself through her photography in often bold and prescient ways as when, in 1959, she began shooting in colour. The results still startle when you see her prints for the first time, the deep tonal richness of the reds and greens adding a heightened otherness to her street tableaux. A young girl, crouching spider-like beneath the gleaming green surface of a pristine car is a study in childhood reverie amid an adult world that seems even more extravagantly unreal. Sadly, most of her colour negatives were lost when her apartment was burgled in 1970, forcing her to shoot again on the same streets with renewed intensity of purpose.
 

In her later photographs, it is the unruly energy and makeshift nature of New York that resonates, the streets becoming less playful and more crowded and combative, her images less joyous as the decades pass. “In the work she made in the 30s and 40s, she is always representing people who occupy their own space in their neighbourhoods,” says Moser, “but, by the late 1960s, and more profoundly in the 1980s, you are seeing in her images the ways in which the city has become increasingly regulated by consumerism and capitalism. This, too, of course, has a real resonance for our times.”
 
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from her first film, In the Street, which she made in 1948 in collaboration with Agee and the poet and photographer Janice Loeb. It is a short, silent, incredibly evocative flow of images from the bustling streets of Spanish Harlem in the 1940s. The first words that appear on screen are: “The streets of the poorer quarters of great cities are above all a theatre and a battleground.” That comes close to capturing the particular atmosphere of Helen Levitt’s extraordinary body of work, if not its singularly expressive power. She was, and remains, a quiet genius of 20th century photography.
 
Helen Levitt: In the Street is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1, from 15 October to 13 February 2022
 
 
Helen Levitt: the most celebrated, least known photographer of her time. By Sean O’Hagan. The Guardian, October 2, 2021. 

“In the Street” is a silent film recorded in the mid to late 1940’s that focuses on everyday life in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City. This work was created with the collaboration of Helen Levitt, the most profound photographer in New York City in her time, James Agee, an influential writer and film critic from Tennessee, and James Loeb, a former banker turned painter and photographer from New York City. Bringing together these three unique and genius minds truly makes this film so powerful. In 1952 the film was re-released with the addition of a piano soundtrack by the work of Arthur Kleiner, an Austrian composer. The piano element completely transformed the work as it becomes more engaging and gives the audience insight to the atmosphere being portrayed.
 
I was instantly drawn to this piece primarily because I am fascinated by the past. I am constantly reading historical fiction novels and with all the research I do on climate change it is evident that everything is linked to the past in its own way. When I saw this candid documentary on something as simple as recording the basic behaviors and interactions between people in the 1940’s I was immediately drawn in. Seeing how the children were able to run free around the city was something we would never see in our modern world. I wonder if this major change in society stems from the media broadcasting every horrible incident that occurs and instilling fear into the world, creating a lack of trust in humanity. It was both comforting and sad to see these children living so care-free because it is nice to know the world hasn’t always been so anxiety ridden and hectic, but at the same time, it is incredibly remorseful to see something so beautiful lost.
 
UbuWeb Film & Video: Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb & James Agee - In the Street (1948/1952)
 
In the Street Directed by Helen Levitt US 1948/1952, 16mm, b/w, sound (piano performance by Arthur Kleiner), 16 min.
 
“In The Street 1948/1952” Directed By Helen Levitt. By Emily Milano. Medium, September 21, 2021.

 

In the Street

This lyrical, slice-of-life documentary (by Helen Levitt, James Agee and Janice Loeb) about East Harlem is one of several outstanding children's documentaries ("The Quiet One" and "Louisiana Story," among others) produced immediately after World War II. The filmmakers captured the energy-filled streets as part theater, part battleground and part playground. In their everyday lives and actions, people project an image of human existence against the turmoil of the street. Named to the National Film Registry in 2006
 
Library of Congress. December 11, 2017. 

The must-see exhibition of the Festival d’Arles, is a retrospective devoted to the work of Helen Levitt which promises to take us into the heart of the American photographer’s work. The exhibition’s curator, Walter Moser, comments on six selected photographs.

 
 
" This is one of Helen Levitt‘s last and at the same time strongest photograph. “Spider-Girl” shows aspects of both her late color work as well as her early black and white photographs from the 1930s and 40s. It was in the 1950s and then again 20 years later when Levitt following a career in film turned yet again to photography and started working in color. The technical parameters of shooting and the urban landscape of New York had changed: Children, once her favorite topic, had disappeared from the streets and been replaced by cars and elderly people on sidewalks, who now dominated her photographs. When children appeared in the pictures they were crammed into tight spaces. Here the girl is squeezes in between a car and the sidewalk. Due to the long exposure time of color film Levitt started to compose her pictures differently. They are less dynamic, yet working with contrasts in color permitted her to create new layers of meaning and spatial situations. The girl’s pose with an obscured face and solely typified by her twisted extremities is echoing Levitt’s surrealistic sensibility of the 1930s and 40s. In her early black and white photographs Levitt frequently showed passersby in strange poses that gave them an alienated and uncanny appearance, breaking with cultural norms regarding depictions of the body. These “grotesque” and subversive representations found their way into Levitt’s works not only through Surrealism, but also through silent and slapstick cinema. "
 
 
 

  
" The silent film influenced Helen Levitt’s way of representing dynamic bodies and expressive gestures decisively. The artist had been an enthusiastic moviegoer since her youth, enjoying the likes of Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy, admiring Charlie Chaplin most of all. Their forms of expression were discussed widely in artist circles of the 1930s and 1940s like the Film and Photo League. Whereas Chaplin and Keaton had relied on exalted gestures, the sound film, gaining popularity in the mid-1930s, entailed a change in acting. Gestures became increasingly restrained and were subordinated to the spoken word. Regarded critically this development again made the silent film an important point of reference for photographers and filmmakers (for example Jean Vigo and Jean Cocteau) who treasured its wider range of visual expression in its expressive bodily representations. Levitt reformulates Charlie Chaplin’s typical way of interacting with objects. Chaplin frequently modified the original function of objects for the sake of the joke. Levitt employed this approach in the picture of a woman, who bends down into a stroller, which in turn appears to swallow her upper body. Like in Chaplin films the objects determine the protagonist’s gestures. The form of the flower in the photograph of the grim looking girl repeats and emphasize her expressively outspread fingers. "
 
 

 
 
" It is often said that Helen Levitt worked with an angle finder–a device which enabled her to photograph people without their knowledge. In my opinion this notion is over-emphasized. For example in the photographs of two smoking boys or a group of four men, the subjects seem unaware of the photographer. Comparing these pictures with the negatives, and seeing other, unpublished variants, it becomes apparent that the people are interacting with Levitt, at times looking or laughing into the camera. In the former photograph Levitt obscured this aspect by cropping a third person, who looked directly into the camera thus revealing the interaction as such. Levitt didn’t stage the people but very often the subjects in the pictures performed and posed being fully aware of the photographer. "
 

  
 
" By 1935 at the latest, Levitt came in touch with the Surrealist movement through Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work. Photographers discovered the urban spaces, where they found paradoxical, enigmatic and humorous elements in their everyday surroundings, when seemingly aimlessly walking the streets. Levitts photographs are based on an ethnographical approach: She rendered children in Halloween costumes and masks as eerie actors of a magic ritual. It strikes one as no mere coincidence that masks were central objects in the context of primitive art, which at the time could regularly be seen in exhibitions, for example in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Also the French magazine Documents, founded by the Surrealist group around Georges Bataille, is a key influence for the surrealist field-research. Documents shows ethnographic documentation of masks from the British museum or cover designs of the famous serial novel Fantômas, thus combining examples from high and pop culture. "
 

Arles Festival 2019 : Helen Levitt as seen by Walter Moser. By Jean-baptiste Gauvin.  Blind Magazine. July 4, 2019

 

New York City’s doorways, storefronts and cascading fire escapes were the grand backdrop to Helen Levitt’s photos. In the Lower East Side and Harlem, children pretended to be bride and groom, wore masks for Halloween or drew with chalk on the sidewalk. The lyricism of her work led her to be called the city’s visual poet laureate, supposedly an apolitical, black-and-white photographer of the everyday.

 
“Helen Levitt is often described as a lyrical and poetic photographer and in my opinion, that is very often the description for female photographers or women artists,” said Walter Moser, the curator of a new retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna. The exhibit challenges the prevailing, romantic narrative found in essays and critiques done mostly by men. The first culprit — perhaps unintentionally — was the writer James Agee, whom Ms. Levitt met through her mentor, Walker Evans. In an essay that later became the introduction to her book “A Way of Seeing,” he wrote in 1946 that “at least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work I know.”
 
But that praise also obscured her intent. “Scholars say that Helen Levitt wasn’t political at all, and I think that is actually not true, because she was part of highly intellectual circles,” Mr. Moser said. Ms. Levitt said as much in an interview with National Public Radio. “I decided I should take pictures of working class people and contribute to the movements,” she said. “Whatever movements there were — Socialism, Communism, whatever was happening.”
 
What was happening was the Depression. The Farm Security Administration, a New Deal project created in 1937, had been sending photographers like Mr. Evans to document rural poverty. Their images promoted recovery programs for farmers and were probably the most comprehensive visual survey to date of the people, culture and places of rural America.
 
At the time, New York was abuzz with leftist activism. The Communist Party U.S.A. (a name that varied) had just moved its headquarters from Chicago to Union Square. Many Eastern European Jews were active in the movement, including photographers. Ms. Levitt, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish immigrant, was influenced by the Photo League and its leader, Sid Grossman, who urged members to photograph with a social awareness. Ms. Levitt reflected that concern, capturing children’s battle games that echoed World War II.
 
Another myth is that she relied on a right-angled viewfinder, supposedly to stealthily photograph her subjects. But contact sheets in the exhibit’s catalog show different stages of her interactions with her subjects, including when they stared right into her lens. The final chosen image was often one that seemed most candid.
 
“Levitt actually very often selected a picture where apparently the photographed people are not aware of the photographer,” Mr. Moser said. “But, when you compare these selected images with the other variants, or the negative strip, or the contact sheet, it becomes clear that very often the people knew about the photographer.”
 
Ms. Levitt was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, in 1913. She worked for a commercial photographer in the Bronx where, for six dollars a week, she learned darkroom basics. But a 1935 exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery led her to discover the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom she would later meet, and Mr. Evans, to whom she showed her photos of children. Mr. Evans and Ms. Levitt later collaborated most famously on their subway photographs.
 
 Taking an interest in film, she became a full-time film editor and director. By the 1950s had made a second career out of her films, one of which was a collaboration with James Agee, and had been nominated for an Academy Award. She returned to photography in 1959 after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship for her street scenes, but this time in color.
 
In fact, Ms. Levitt was a pioneer of color photography. But again, she was upstaged by men. Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston have always been hailed as the pioneers of fine-art color photography, but Ms. Levitt had her exhibition of color work at the Museum of Modern Art some two years before Mr. Eggleston.
 
“When you think about Walker Evans or Henri Cartier-Bresson, they’re all really famous and Helen Levitt is not,” Mr. Moser said. “And of course, that’s also how art history is written. Very often women photographers or women artists are overlooked, and that’s a thing that we wanted to correct.”
 
Helen Levitt’s Street Photos Blend the Poetic With the Political. By Rena Silverman. The New York Times, January 16, 2019

 

Helen Levitt found magic on the grimy streets of New York. Her photographs from the '30s and '40s capture the grit and vigor and humor of the city. And she kept on shooting for much of her life.

 
Helen Levitt died in her sleep over the weekend. She was 95.
 
Late in 2001, I visited her in her small, well-worn Greenwich Village apartment for a story about her life and career.
 
And it was probably one of the toughest interviews I've ever done. It quickly became clear she didn't much like talking about her work. I tried asking about one of her best-known images — a black and white picture of four young girls watching soap bubbles drift across the street. I asked her what she captured in that picture.
 
"Just what you see," Levitt said.
 
I asked her why it was hard to talk about her photography.
 
"If it were easy to talk about, I'd be a writer," she said. "Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images."
 
And I asked if she was happy with the picture when she looked at it, if it gave her pleasure.
 
"Yeah," she said. "I think it's a nice picture."
 
Levitt was charming, though, in her own tough way, living with her yellow tabby cat, Binky, up four flights of stairs.
 
She told me, briefly, about meeting the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and learning from him that a picture didn't have to have social meaning — that it could "stand up by itself."
 
Capturing Small, Perfect Moments
 
And she talked some about walking around the streets of New York and how she could capture those moments unnoticed.
 
"I had attached to my camera — I had a little device that fit on the Leica camera that they called a winkelsucher, which meant that you could look one way and take the picture the other," she said. "You could turn your camera sideways."
 
They were small, perfect moments that she found, though she would never tell you that.
 
In a photo from circa 1940, some street urchins in tattered clothes cluster on the sidewalk. They're holding the frame of a broken mirror, a boy on a bicycle framed exactly in that open space.
 
In one of my favorites, we see just the back and legs of a woman. She has dived up to her shoulders into her son's baby carriage, as he laughs in huge delight.
 
This was a time when life was lived on the streets, and that's where Levitt spent her time — especially in Spanish Harlem.
 
"It was a very good neighborhood for taking pictures in those days, because that was before television," she said. "There was a lot happening. And then the older people would sometimes be sitting out on the stoops because of the heat. They didn't have air conditioning in those days. It was, don't forget, in the late '30s. So those neighborhoods were very active."
 
When I was in her apartment, I saw boxes of prints stacked up. One was labeled simply "nothing good." Another one was marked "here and there."
 
"That's the beginning of another book," she said about the box.
 
"Can I take a peek?" I asked.
 
"Nope," she said. "'Cause I'm unsure about it. If I was sure that they were worth anything, I'd show it to you. But I can't."
 
Well, she must have decided they were worth something. That book, Here and There, came out a few years later.
 
One Last Visit
 
About a year after my first visit, I went back to see Levitt one more time.
 
I was moving away from New York, and I wanted to bring a piece of the city with me. She let me look through some boxes of prints, and the one I bought from her that day hangs on my living room wall.
 
It shows two young children on the street, of course — not the sidewalk. They're in the middle of the street, and they're dancing. A white girl, in bright white shoes and a summer dress, her arms raised up — maybe she's about to twirl — turns toward a black boy, smaller, in shorts, with one arm curved joyfully over his head.
 
I'm sure they had no idea Levitt was there.

Helen Levitt Captured Perfect Moments, Unnoticed. By Melissa Block. NPR, March 30, 2009.

Helen Levitt's Indelible Eye
 
Helen Levitt is considered "a photographer's photographer" — little known by the public, but revered by fellow photographers. She has a new book of her photos documenting New York City street scenes, and talks about her life with All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block.

NPR. January 17, 2002.