A few days ago, I saw the impressive cover (showing two children playing) of Everything But The Girl’s album “Love Not Money” in Kazuto Yamaki’s The Essentials vol.1 column here on SEIN Online. It inspired me to write about the photographer Helen Levitt in my column, as the one subject Levitt was most interested in were children playing joyfully in the streets.

Helen Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913. Aged 18, she began working in a portrait studio in the Bronx and devoted herself to the study of photography. She soon met Walker Evans, worked as his assistant, and became renowned for her Henry Cartier-Bresson-inspired snapshot photography, shot on small-frame Leica cameras.

Between the 1930s and the late ‘40s, Levitt focused on photographing in the diverse neighborhoods of Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side—areas mostly inhabited by immigrant families. Her photographs from this era are collected in her magnum opus, the photobook “A Way of Seeing.”Back then, before there were TVs to sit in front of, children made back alleys and streets their playgrounds. From her own, unique perspective, Levitt’s photographs show us the liveliness and the wild, animated expressions of children absorbed entirely within their own worlds—the games that unfold daily (hide-and-seek, various war games etc.), the chalk drawings on the asphalt, the bullies and their victims.

Levitt captured more than the children, though: adults sitting in chairs brought out onto the streets, seemingly lost in nostalgia; groups of women immersed in gossip. Her photographs show a New York that knew no borders between races, where black, white and latin Americans simply went about their days, and New York happened anew, each day, with “good ol’ days” vibe slightly reminiscent of the immediate postwar days of Japan’s Showa era. At the same time, the photos exhibit Levitt’s technical mastery and her sharp senses, which bring to mind William Klein’s portrayal of 1950s everyday life in his “New York” series.

The carefree humanity in these photographs and their ability to burrow themselves deeply into the hearts of their audience may be a reflection of Levitt’s love for the city of her childhood. The circumstance that her first photobook only came into being twenty years after having taken these photographs, however, was surely influenced by Levitt’s humility and her aversion of being in the spotlight.

As a woman photographer, Helen Levitt was a pioneer. She is highly regarded as a “photographer’s photographer” today, but died virtually unknown ten years ago at the age of 95, having lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village together with her cat.
Her mentor Walker Evans once called her photography “anti-journalism.” And it is true—her invaluable work captured street life not in news photographs but from a personal, unique viewpoint, preserving these scenes for the present age in images that still radiate with energy.