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Helen Levitt: In the Street, review: the marvellous, off-kilter world of New York City’s streets

New York, 1973, by Helen Levitt, at the Photographer's Gallery - Imaging Services, MoMA, N.Y.
New York, 1973, by Helen Levitt, at the Photographer's Gallery - Imaging Services, MoMA, N.Y.

For some photographers the camera is a shield, a barrier between them and the world. For others, it’s a weapon. Helen Levitt’s camera was different: a hand out-stretched, an invitation to perform and play. Yet, like play, her photographs are often spiked with menace. They are are simple, but shimmer with strangeness.

Levitt was “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time,” judged the critic David Levi Strauss in 1997. Since her death in 2009, that hasn’t changed much. Now, though, a superb retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery aims to right that wrong. Split over two floors, Helen Levitt: In the Street surveys 50 years of work, from her socio-cultural reportage of the 1930s to surrealistic experiments with colour in the 1980s and in doing so, makes a full-throated case for Levitt as one of the most influential street photographers of the 20th century.

Born in 1913, Levitt spent her life in New York and, aside from a short sojourn in Mexico, she had one subject: the ceaseless theatre of the city’s streets. Living alone with a cat called Binky, she sallied out with a secondhand 35mm camera to capture everyday life in the poor neighborhoods nearby: Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem.

At first, she was influenced by the left-wing Workers Film and Photo League, and their desire to use photography to effect social change. But an encounter with Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1935 turned her eye: “I realised photography could be an art – and that made me ambitious,” she said, and began to amp up the surrealism of her compositions in response, encouraging her subjects to mug for the camera like silent movie stars.

In one witty photograph, two black boys lounge in too-big suits, puffing on rollies with wise-guy swagger. In another, two old men are seen from behind, sat in wicker chairs, their shadows cast forward into the street. They could be waiting for Godot – or the Number 43 bus.

New York, 1940, by Helen Levitt, at the Photographer's Gallery - Albertina Museum, Vienna
New York, 1940, by Helen Levitt, at the Photographer's Gallery - Albertina Museum, Vienna

But eeriness blows through the exhibition too. Levitt edited her photographs to remove any evidence of her orchestration; they are presented as found artefacts, the record of an anthropologist exploring a slightly uncanny land. Children and Halloween masks are a common theme. One shot captures two boys scaling an impossibly spindly tree in a dingy tenement courtyard. With their faces covered by cloth masks and hats pulled low, they look like extras from The Wicker Man. Levitt, like Roald Dahl, understood that though childhood was a world steeped in wonder, it was also shadowed by threat.

Levitt never saw the people she photographed purely as subjects, though. Instead, they were actors, collaborators, fellow playmates. Even during her pioneering embrace of colour in the late Fifties – when it was seen as deeply unfashionable in artistic circles – she finds humour and humanity in their hardscrabble lives. In perhaps my favourite photograph, which could be a still from a David Lynch film, an old lady in a blue dress peers imperiously towards the horizon like she’s keeping an eye out for ET.

Like the rest of this spare, elegant exhibition, it beckons to us towards Levitt’s marvellous, off-kilter world.

'Helen Levitt: In the Street' runs from Oct 15-Feb 2022 at the Photographers’ Gallery