Helen Levitt Captured the Poetry of New York City
A new survey publication serves as a testament to the photographer’s belief that the city’s working-class communities of color possessed a beauty and drama all their own.
Photographer Helen Levitt, who was born in Bensonhurst in 1913 and died at the age of 95 in her fifth-floor apartment in Greenwich Village, lived in New York City her entire life (save for a five-month sojourn to Mexico) and never lost her Flatbush accent. She was friends with photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, and, like the latter, collaborated with writer James Agee, but she never received the level of attention and acclaim that her male contemporaries did. Though Levitt is perhaps best known for her photographs of children’s chalk drawings in the 1930s, they comprise only a fraction of her six-decade practice, whose emotional complexity and formal innovation continue to captivate. The comprehensive book Helen Levitt, edited by Joshua Chuang, draws from the breadth of her output with rarely seen images and scholarly essays that focus on her early expeditions with a Leica, 1941 trip to Mexico, experiments with color photography, two series taken in the New York subway, and final photographs from the 1980s.
Levitt was an avid reader and movie-goer who dropped out of high school because she was bored with rote memorization, as Chuang, who also organized a traveling exhibition of the same name, notes in his introductory essay. After apprenticing in a commercial photography studio, she bought her own camera and in 1934 joined the leftist New York Film and Photo League, where she met and befriended Cartier-Bresson, whom she said “made me ambitious.” In 1937, Levitt started teaching children’s art classes in East Harlem through the Federal Art Project and began photographing her pupils’ sidewalk chalk drawings. It was around this time that she sought out Evans, who took her on as a mentee, assistant, and, briefly, a lover.
