by Gerald Boerner
“Whatever roll of film I have, that’s what I’ll shoot.”
— Helen Levitt
“I don’t have kids and don’t know people who have ‘em.”
— Helen Levitt
“[Levitt was] unquestionably among the greatest photographers that ever lived…”
Thomas Roma, Friend
“Other than Cartier-Bresson? Maybe Lartigue, but he’s not really a street photographer. I like a lot of them [street photographers].”
— Helen Levitt
“Even now, fifty years after the first of her three exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Levitt remains what is known as a ‘photographer’s photographer.’ ”
— Maria Morris Hambourg
“Walker needed someone to go with him in the subway. I would just sit next to him, so we were just two people in the subway, so people wouldn’t stare at him. It was fun. He had a special trick.”
— Helen Levitt
“You might get the wrong impression about Helen Levitt from her photographs. They are dying to talk. She is not. She lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village.”
— Sarah Boxer, New York Times Books
“The streets were crowded with all kinds of things going on, not just children. Everything was going on in the street in the summertime. They didn’t have air-conditioning. Everybody was out on the stoops, sitting outside, on chairs.”
— Helen Levitt
“Also, maybe in the classrooms they don’t use the chalk as much. They used to steal it. Not steal it, pocket it, as we all did. I don’t think I did. I still have chalk in the other room. It comes from the early days when we were making film. On the black thing, you’d write, Scene 1.”
— Helen Levitt
Note:
Helen Levitt passed on in May, 2009. A selection of her images and a very good interview and overview of her work, especially that completed during the 1930-1945 timeframe, is found in B&W magazine, Volume 11, No. 70 (October, 2009). Please take a look at this for additional information.
Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009)
Helen Levitt was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for "street photography" around New York City, and has been called "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.
Levitt grew up in Brooklyn. Dropping out of high school, she taught herself photography while working for a commercial photographer. While teaching some classes in art to children in 1937, Levitt became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children’s street culture of the time. She purchased a Leica camera and began to photograph these works, as well as the children who made them. The resulting photographs were ultimately published in 1987 as In The Street: chalk drawings and messages, New York City 1938–1948.
She associated with Walker Evans in 1938-39. In 1943, Edward Steichen curated her first solo exhibition "Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children" at the Museum of Modern Art. She subsequently began to find press work as a documentary photographer.
In 1959 and 1960, Levitt received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take color photographs on the streets of New York, and she returned to still photography. In 1965 she published her first major collection, A Way of Seeing. Much of her work in color from the 1960s was stolen in a 1970 burglary of her East 13th Street apartment. The remaining photos, and others taken in the following years, can be seen in the 2005 book Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt. In 1976, she was a Photography Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Click on the image below to access the Slide Show.
In the late 1940s, Levitt made two documentary films with Janice Loeb and James Agee: In the Street (1948) and The Quiet One (1948). Levitt, along with Loeb and Sidney Meyers, received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of The Quiet One. Levitt was active in film making for nearly 25 years; her final film credit is as an editor for John Cohen’s documentary The End of an Old Song (1972). Levitt’s other film credits include the cinematography on The Savage Eye (1960), which was produced by Ben Maddow, Meyers, and Joseph Strick, and also as an assistant director for Strick and Maddow’s film version of Genet’s play The Balcony (1963). In her biographical essay, Maria Hambourg writes that Levitt "has all but disinherited this part of her work."
She lived in New York City and remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years. New York’s "visual poet laureate" was notoriously private and publicity shy.
Levitt’s wonderfully candid black-and-white shots from the 1930s and 40s — of urban kids playing, and ordinary people going about their lives — have inspired generations of photographers. So it was a delight to be able to see so many of her original silver gelatin prints up-close.
Most surprising, for me however, was to discover her vintage dye-transfer color prints from the 60s through the 80s. The color is super-saturated and startling in its ability to evoke strong memories from that period. The wonderfully warm and humorous street theater is still present in these photos, but the luscious color itself almost steals the show.
Levitt was a pioneer of color photography, starting seriously in 1959, when she received a Guggenheim grant to explore her familiar territory, but shifting from black-and-white to color. Her grant was renewed for a second year in 1960, and she recorded hundreds of color images in these intense two years. Unfortunately, we will probably never see any of those photographs. A discreet burglar broke into her apartment in 1970, and stole almost all of her color transparencies and prints — and not much else.
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Helen Levitt that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Levitt
