[Deathwatch] Helen Levitt, photographer, 95

[Deathwatch Central]

Helen Levitt dies at 95; 
New York street photographer of poignant dramas

She pioneered street photography in the U.S., using East Harlem and the
Lower East Side of New York City as frequent settings. She was quick to
recognize an extraordinary scene and quick to react.
By Mary Rourke

April 1, 2009

Helen Levitt, who pioneered street photography in the United States in
the 1930s, taking pictures of small, poignant dramas with the help of
an inconspicuous Leica camera, died Sunday at her apartment in New York
City. She was 95.

The cause was respiratory failure, according to Marvin Hoshino, a
longtime friend.

Using East Harlem and the Lower East Side of New York City as frequent
settings, Levitt caught the humor, frustration and delight of everyday
life, particularly among the city's poor. She was quick to recognize an
extraordinary scene and quick to react.

"Helen was one of the first American photographers to identify street
photography as potentially an art form," said Sandra Phillips, San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art senior curator of photography. "She
wasn't a photojournalist, she was more like a poet."

Levitt bought a used Leica in 1936 and took to the city streets, making
children her most frequent subjects. Her images of young girls
following soap bubbles down a street, boys waltzing on the sidewalk and
laughing at themselves, children playing on the narrow ledge above a
doorway like a Grecian frieze come to life, capture the sense of
discovery that is part of childhood.

"There is a sweetness to Levitt's work, but the subjects are serious,"
Arthur Ollman, the former director of the Museum of Photographic Arts
in San Diego said in a 2004 interview with The Times. "She recognized
real, formative moments in a child's life. She saw the dignity of
children, they were not strange 'other' beings to her."

Her pictures of white chalk drawings are a historical record of the
innocence of children at play. One of them shows a drawing of a bicycle
that is so carefully detailed it suggests a wish to own such a
marvelous thing. Another shows neat, concentric circles accompanied by
a message: "Button to Secret Passage. Press."

"People think I love children, but I don't," Levitt said in a 2001
interview with the New Yorker magazine. "Not more than the next person.
It was just that children were out in the street."

In the 1930s, she said, a lot of living went on in public places. "That
was before television and air-conditioning," Levitt told the Chicago
Tribune in 2003. "People would be outside, and if you just waited long
enough they forgot about you." She set her lens focus and waited.

The results were like "fragments of a play whose first and last acts
are elsewhere," New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik said in the forward to
Levitt's book "Here and There" (2002).

>From the start of her career Levitt moved among the greatest talents in
her business. She became friends with Walker Evans and Henri
Cartier-Bresson in the 1930s. Both of them helped her develop her
style.

She learned by looking at the photographs of Cartier-Bresson, who lived
in New York City in the mid-1930s. He took a photograph only when the
timing was right -- "the decisive moment." Levitt credited him with
showing her how both luck and planning played a part in the sort of
images she wanted to create.

Levitt also was briefly influenced by a trend among talented young
photographers to work for the Farm Security Administration and other
government agencies in the New Deal, taking pictures of
poverty-stricken farmers and mountain people. But she was not a social
reformer. "I never intend to make statements in my pictures," she told
the Chicago Tribune in 2003. "People say, 'What does this or that
mean?' I don't have a good answer for them. You see what you see."

Speed was another feature of her work. "She was faster than anybody at
taking a picture," Ollman said of Levitt. That, and her way of
capturing a scene as if it were a high point in a continuing drama,
became hallmarks of her art.

>From the mid-1930s, Levitt and Evans shared a darkroom and roamed the
New York subways together. He showed her how to use a right-angle
viewfinder to trick her subjects into thinking that she was not aiming
at them. "Evans probably taught Levitt to avoid sentimentality," Ollman
said. "He loathed anything too overt, too obvious."

Through Evans, Levitt met James Agee who wrote the text for "Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men," (1941), a book that featured Evans' photos of
Depression-era tenant farmers.

In an introductory essay to "A Way of Seeing," a book Levitt and Agee
produced in the 1940s and published in 1965, Agee said Levitt's
photographs amount to "an un-insistent but irrefutable manifesto of a
way of seeing, and in a gentle and wholly unpretentious way, a major
poetic work."

Levitt also made a number of notable films. After venturing into
filmmaking in the 1930s with Spanish director Luis Buñuel, she
collaborated with Agee on "The Quiet One" (1948), a documentary about a
young runaway who finds help in a school for troubled boys. She and
Agee were among four writers on the film, which was nominated for
Academy Awards in the best documentary film and best screenplay
categories.

She and Agee also were the cinematographers for "In the Street" (1952),
a short documentary about life in East Harlem in 1945 and '46. An
18-minute film that plays out like Levitt's still photographs come to
life, it shows boys in a flour-bomb fight, a girl licking a window like
a cat, children in Halloween costumes. According to Phillips, it is
often included in film festivals as one of the best films by a
photographer.

Levitt was born Aug. 31, 1913, in Brooklyn, N.Y., into a middle-class
family. She had two brothers, Robert and William. She dropped out of
high school just before graduation and found a job in a commercial
photographer's studio. As a young girl Levitt planned to be an artist
but gave up the idea because she decided she had no talent for drawing.


>From the time she bought her first Leica in her 20s, city life seemed
to be all that she needed for subject matter. She rarely traveled for
the sake of her work but did take one trip to Mexico, in 1941. More
than five decades later, it resulted in a book, "Helen Levitt: Mexico
City," published by W.W. Norton in 1997.

She had her first major museum exhibition in 1943 at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. A number of museum exhibitions followed over
the next 60 years.

Despite her rising success, Levitt went through several periods when
she took few photographs. From the mid-1940s until the late '50s she
worked primarily as an editor on documentary films. When she went back
to shooting photos in about 1959, she took some of her first color
slides, supporting herself primarily with fellowships and grants. Many
of those photos were stolen when her apartment was robbed in the 1960s.


Her scenes from the 1970s show a grittier New York City. During this
time she also became interested in farm animals, photographing pigs and
chickens that she followed around barnyards during short trips to New
England and upstate New York.

She was in her 80s when she received the Master of Photography Award
given by the International Center of Photography in New York City in
1997. The award was accompanied by a major exhibition of her work,
"Crosstown."

Four years later, a book of the same title was published by powerHouse
Books. It was a terrible year for the city that Levitt had known in a
gentler era. Asked if she had any thoughts about the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, the plain-spoken photographer told a New Yorker
magazine writer, "Nothing will move me from my city," but "I think you
should get the hell outta here."

Levitt, who never married, is survived by her younger brother, William,
the former longtime mayor of Alta, Utah.


Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary