Helen Levitt: In The Streets

The Photographer’s Gallery

Last week, on the closing weekend of the exhibition, I went to see seven decades worth of work by Helen Levitt presented as a retrospective at The Photographer’s Gallery, tucked just below Oxford Street. In the late afternoon, towards the end of the week, the gallery was the busiest I’ve seen it in a long time, the café buzzing and humming with conversation. I got my £2.50 student ticket and took the lift up to the top floor.  

The exhibition rooms were, like the café, full.  

 There is something quite rare, I’ve only really experienced it in retrospectives (owing, naturally, to the huge collection from which to curate a show), about being completely transfixed by every. single. artwork in an exhibition and not finding a single one that allows you to pass it without much thought. This was that rare kind of show. Given that there were over 130 works, I was there for a while.  

Levitt spent decades documenting with humour and care her home of New York. The sidewalks and subways, from the youngest to the oldest of it’s inhabitants, build up a portrait of the neighbourhoods she frequented. The influence of surrealism and theatre bubble to the surface and each scene captured by Levitt is simultaneously so simple, so perfectly ordinary, and yet swimming in details, with personalities and stories that leap out of the frames. 

 I am drawn to colour always, and certainly her colour photographs are beautifully saturated and her use of colour to frame her subjects creates a new language with which to communicate in. Having said this, it was the contact sheets and tiny black and white images that had the lasting impact. 

There is something so intentional and thoughtful about how she narrates these lives living amongst poverty, dirt and dust and, in one case quite literally, the gutters of the city. There is no forcing of political commentary, just a kind acknowledgment and respect for the stories which are being told.  This approach is universally appreciated, as seen by the little comment cards that visitors were encouraged to fill out. Thoughtful and thought provoking lines scrawled in pencil, alongside little drawings of the cat being held in one of the photographs.

Curator Walter Moser, unsurprisingly, expressed the difficulty of selecting the pieces to be exhibited given the sheer volume of Levitt’s archived works, in a range of mediums. To think of her only as a street photographer is to ignore her significant contribution to filmmaking, the books that she produced and her work with slideshows (one of which is displayed).  

This exhibition raised questions that I couldn’t answer, as all great art usually does. I wondered where the line was between appreciation, documentation and exploitation – especially as I looked at the photographs taken on a trip to Mexico of people living in poverty (her only body of work taken outside of NYC). I considered what may or may not have changed since Levitt’s time with regards to photographing children and vulnerable people.  

I have seen work focused entirely on documenting the lives of others which I have felt uncomfortable with, there has been a je ne sais quoi which has made me doubt or question the ethics or intention. Levitt’s work doesn’t do this to me. Perhaps because I totally trust, wrongly or rightly, the institution which is showing her work… or the critics who have discussed and lauded her for decades, or perhaps because the kind gaze that I mentioned before seeps through in a way I’ve not seen before. Levitt’s work convey a genuine interest, love and respect for her subjects and her city. She is cataloguing life in all it’s minute moments of magic, and NYC in the 70’s looks pretty magic from here.  

See below an interview with the curators.