Helen Levitt's Life In The Life Of Helen Levitt

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Helen Levitt was born and raised in Brooklyn NY. After dropping out of high school she began working for a commercial photographer, where she learnt the technical aspects of what was to become her profession. Around 1937 at the age of about 24, she purchased a second hand Leica camera and – intrigued by children’s chalk drawings she would see around her neighbourhood – started to take photos of her own.

Levitt did not restrict herself to images chalk drawings however; her first published image was of three children on the front steps of a building, in paper masks preparing for Halloween. And she went on to capture some of the most lyrical documentary images to have been published.

What Levitt captured in the streets of New York City between 1938 to 1948 were everyday occurrences that where beautifully composed. Her main subjects were simply of ordinary people in the streets, going about their daily business, but most of all of children and their very own street culture of sorts. She continuously captured intimate glimpses of them playing or dancing, in ragged clothes or with sticks and chalk as toys, or simply using their own imagination that would blossom into beautiful self-expression.

She captured moments in these children’s lives that in some way seem magical and unreal, especially to adults living in the 21st century. But in fact these dreamlike instances happened all the time – or that’s what her work would have us believe – she simply took the image at the right moment.

Levitt seemed drawn to capture the underprivileged (Levitt & Oles 1997), and although she would use the whole city for her images Levitt preferred to shoot in the Spanish Harlem or poorer working class areas of town (Block 2002).
She was quoted in sa...

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...hotographs right up until her death in 2009 (Williamson 2009). She hated attention, and was what some would call a “photographers photographer” (Block 2002), as she was far more acclaimed by her peers than she ever was by the public. In her lifetime and after her death she has been called a street, documentary and lyrical photographer, and compared to the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, someone she drew great inspiration from.

I’m going to end with extract from James Agee’s forward in Helen Levitt’s published work: ‘A Way of Seeing’ (1965), which I believe sums up her early work perfectly.
“In Miss Levitt’s photographs the general feeling is that surrealism is that of the ordinary metropolitan soil which breeds these remarkable juxtapositions and moments, and that what we call “fantasy” is, instead, reality in its unmasked vigour and grace.” (Levitt & Agee 1965)

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