Eyewitness – pictures that speak a thousand words

Levene has worked taking pictures for the paper’s Eyewitness series for the last nine years.

A new show at London bookstore Foyles will bring together ten images from the 120-odd Eyewitness photographs by Levene, all sharing the theme of how people and places are affected by urbanism.

The exhibition, simply entitled David Levene: Eyewitness, has been curated by Mark Davy, who says Levene’s work ‘[combines] an epic scale and detailed narrative that allows each image to take repeated viewing’.

He’s not wrong: the colours and patterns within the scenes Levene captures form snapshots in time, where people and objects create narratives that look almost choreographed.

The multiple characters within each image have their own individual characters that build a complicated whole, allowing the viewer to get lost in the scene, giving an insight into the story that text could struggle to offer.

In Levene’s work, we see the old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words come into its own.

David Levene: Eyewitness runs from 2 September – 26 October at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0DT