HELEN LEVITT: IN THE STREET
Capturing the beauty, bustle and squalor
One of the most influential street photographers of the 20th Century, Helen Levitt spent decades documenting local communities in her native New York. She captured the beauty, bustle, and squalor of everyday life in neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side, Bronx, and Spanish Harlem. The exhibition Helen Levitt: In the Street at The Photographers’ Gallery in London is a retrospective of a career spanning seven decades.
From the 1930s through the 1990s, Levitt produced an extensive body of work consisting of various projects and mediums, from photographs to artist books, and was an early proponent of avant-garde filmmaking. Walter Moses, the exhibition curator, spent several years researching Levitt’s archive. Moses commented that Helen Levitt is “mostly known for her photographs, she wasn’t only working as a photographer, but also as a filmmaker, and to see her only as a photographer, in my opinion, is very reductive.”
Also showing as part of the exhibition is In the Street (1953), the experimental documentary Levitt made with filmmaker Janice Loeb and the writer James Agee which focused on street life in Spanish Harlem. The first of several film projects, In the Street, corresponds to her photographic work, providing a moving portrait of her still photography and is considered a forerunner of the cinéma vérité style emerging in the 1960s.
Levitt dropped out of high school at 18, and after briefly working with a commercial portrait photographer, she devoted herself entirely to photography in 1936. Inspired by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, she bought a 35-millimeter camera and started photographing her local neighborhoods. “In her photographs, it’s much more about the moment, about the snapshot,” said TPG’s Senior Curator, Anna Dannemann.
Levitt was also one of the early pioneers of color street photography and was one of the first photographers to exhibit her color work in 1974. In 1959 after receiving a Guggenheim grant to shoot on the streets of New York City, Levitt returned to many of the exact locations she shot in the early days of her career, recreating those same scenes in richly colored prints.
“You could always put a Helen Levitt show on and it would be of significance and importance,” said Danneman. Levitt’s work is universal and is not steeped in a specific time frame, “we’re looking at characters, we’re looking at people and how they behave, and how they act on the streets in a certain time and we can connect to that, and we can find interest in that.”
Helen Levitt: In the Street at The Photographers’ Gallery in London is on view through February 13, 2022.
