Helen Levitt: Eye In The Streets

Helen Levitt: Eye in the streets

Helen Levitt, born August 31, 1913, is an American documentary photographer.

She grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She was unable to get anything out of school so she dropped out before graduating and went to work for a commercial photographer. She gains a lot of technical knowledge and leaves the company to follow her dreams. She would train her eye by going to museums and art galleries and study the paintings for their composition.

Helen Levitt was, during her lifetime, only one of a few female photographers working with street photography. It was not until the 1940's that women photographers were common. In addition, the development of street photography, as a genre, was partly due to the development of the Leica. Before the emergence of small format cameras, it was difficult to photograph spontaneously. The technology was too slow and cameras were too bulky. The economic boom, after the Great Depression, also contributed to the rise of street photography. With renewed prosperity came an increase in leisure time allowing more people to take up photography.

In 1935 Levitt met Cartier-Bresson, who is known for his belief in the "decisive moment", when he spent a year in New York. On one occasion she accompanied him while he photographed along the Brooklyn waterfront. In 1936, she bought a Leica, which was the camera favored by Cartier-Bresson. The cameras small size and her sharp eye allowed her to capture her images quickly and discretely. She studied with the photographer Walker Evans, who was known for his depression era photos, in 1938-9. Levitt worked on several projects whose themes promoted humanist causes. She worked mostly in the densely populated streets of Harlem and the Lower East Side because this is where and when she found activity on sidewalks and front stoops at its most vibrant. She took the everyday activity of New York City as her primary subject, paying special attention to the children for whom the street served as a playground.

Levitt's work was first published in Fortune magazine in July 1939 as part of a special issue on New York City. Her best-known picture, three properly dressed children preparing to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939, was included at an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask, while a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a step down, while another boy, also masked, sits on a lower step, coolly waiting and surveying the world.

She organizes her pictures around specific sites of urban life: the stoop, the doorway, the window, the vacant lot, and the curb. The transitional zones of urban geography provide the framework of her photographic messages. Levitt's consistent and careful framing of play-scenes makes the picture itself into a space of play. Levitt was also a pioneer in color photography, beginning in 1959, when she received a Guggenheim grant to explore her familiar territory, but shifting from black-and-white to color.

By the 1970's Spanish Harlem was struggling with race riots, drug abuse, crime and poverty. The