New York City Street Life: Helen Levitt

“If it were easy to talk about, I’d be a writer. Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.” 
–Helen Levitt

American photography legend Helen Levitt died March 29th in her Greenwich Village home at the age of 95. Best known for her candid shots of everyday life in New York’s working-class neighborhoods, she was one of photography’s most influential street documentarians. “Helen Levitt: A Memorial Tribute,” Levitt’s 12th show at New York’s Laurence Miller Gallery, on view May through June 2009, replaced a survey that was in the works when Levitt died. The show presented a survey of the photographer’s 70-year career that also included, in addition to her best-known images of children playing on the stoops and streets of New York, such surprises as a little-known series of portraits taken on the subway using Walker Evans’ camera, never exhibited first proofs, and Levitt’s experiments with color in the 1970s.

Helen Levitt made her mark on photography during the social crisis of the 1930s. While other photographers worked for government-funded projects—Walker Evans documented the rural south and Lewis Hine labor conditions while Dorothea Lange revealed urban plights—Levitt chose, at age 23, the subject to which she’d singularly devote a long career located just outside her door in New York’s neighborhoods.

Raised in Brooklyn, NY, Levitt left high school before graduating. She began work for a commercial photographer, building her technical knowledge over the next four years. Her self-taught education, which focused on the world of film, art, photography, theater performances and dance, aligned her with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. Like them, she set about creating a blunt photographic record of ordinary facts in which was revealed the mystery and poetry within daily life.

In 1936 Levitt purchased the same compact Leica camera Cartier-Bresson used. She would later say about meeting him that she learned “a picture didn’t have to have social meaning—that it could stand up by itself.” The right-angle viewfinder—a winkelsucher—she attached to her Leica became central to her ability to maneuver through the neighborhood streets and photograph the natural choreography of children at play. The device allowed her to look one way and take a picture the other. She could remain on the fringes without disturbing the ongoing reality.

This practice allowed her to work unobtrusively, almost invisibly, in the poor or working-class communities of New York City. In these neighborhoods, the rhythms of daily life were played out in full view on public sidewalks. Levitt responded to this protean theater of the street by creating photographs that are lyrical, uncontrived and mysterious. Fascinated by the simplest activities and the most fleeting gestures, she captured the feral world of the child unobserved. Her photographs from the ‘30s and ‘40s capture the grit, vigor and humor of the city.

Today these images from the series entitled “New York, c. 1940,” transport us to a lost world where children played freely on the street, engaged by life’s small happenings, and adults engaged their neighbors. 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,” Levitt once 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.”

In one image, a group of children gather around a broken mirror (see pg. 22). Some toy with the shards, others look on, but everywhere—in the foreground, in the mirror’s reflective surface, Levitt captures the jazz and life of the street. In other images, she zooms in, capturing the immediate drama of children dancing, or a turf war played out upon the kingdom of a stoop. Another captures the quaint antiquated charm of a portable carousel, ferried from street to street.
Levitt received high critical praise in the 1940s: her pictures were published and she had her first solo exhibition in 1943 at the Museum of Modern Art. The first book of her photographs, A Way of Seeing, a selection of 44 uncaptioned images with an essay by James Agee, did not appear, unfortunately, until many years later. Assembled in 1946, the book was not published until 1965.

The subway pictures Levitt took with her friend Evans’ camera are interesting for their subtle differences from his work in this arena—in hers the subjects look less wary and haggard. Levitt’s first proofs and final images, shown here, tell us much about her eye and its ability to skew to the immediate. But the real pleasure with this exhibition begins in learning about Levitt’s role as a pioneer of color photography. In 1959, the photographer received a Guggenheim grant to explore her familiar territory, but with a shift from black and white to color work. Her grant was renewed for a second year in 1960, and she recorded hundreds of color images in these intense two years. The work vanished 10 years later when a burglar broke into her apartment, stealing almost all of her color transparencies and prints—and not much else.

Undaunted, Levitt went back out into the streets in the 70s with her camera to start all over again. The color photographs, plus a handful of images from 1959–60 which survived, were featured in the Miller show. Several of these color photos were shown as a slide show at Levitt’s New York Museum of Modern Art in 1974—one of the first times photographs were formally displayed this way in a museum, and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world.

In these dye-transfer color prints from the 60s through the 80s, the color is super-saturated and startling in its ability to convey a sense of immediacy and life. Here is Levitt’s theatre of the street, but the intensity of the color imparts a lushness previously inexperienced in her work. In New York, 1980, a young girl squats at the curb, looking underneath a green muscle car. In the background a pale blue retrofitted Volkswagen seals the era perfectly (see below). The fragility of the girl’s small hand on the side of the car, the rough beauty of the conflagration of shapes created by the contortion of her young body and the curving lines of the cars contrasts with the hardscape of the street. In New York, 1972, a young Hispanic boy and girl relax against a gumball machine outside a market. His exposed soft baby belly and the girl’s print dress, lush with peaches, echo the abundance of fruit in the market window. Their relaxed gestures suggest a confidence, an ease about one’s known world that seems somehow more distant than the street scenes of decades before.

Writing about Levitt’s work in the forward to A Way of Seeing, writer James Agee said: “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, a tolerant but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”

Judith Turner-Yamamoto’s articles have appeared in Elle, The Boston Globe, Finnair, The Los Angeles Times, Travel & Leisure and Southern Accents, among others