Helen Levitt – City at Play
Fotomuseum Winterthur is presenting the first retrospective dedicated to the US-American photographer Helen Levitt and brings together her extensive body of work with her archive, which has only recently become accessible to the public. Across thematic chapters, the exhibition offers a broader perspective on a photographer who is still known above all for her photographs from the streets of New York.
More than 200 photographs spanning half a century, the documentary short film In the Street (1948), a projection of colour slides and some 115 items of ephemera as well as archival material offer an insight into the range of her photographic work. On view are early gelatine silver prints, dye transfer prints, a slide projection of her colour photographs and previously unpublished contact prints.
The touring exhibition is a collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and was curated by Joshua Chuang. Its international venues include Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona and Madrid, Kunsthal Rotterdam and C/O Berlin.
New York – City at Play, 1936–1988
Over five decades, Helen Levitt photographed social life in the public spaces of New York, particularly in neighbourhoods such as the Bronx, Harlem and the Lower East Side. These districts are shaped by working-class communities and diverse cultural backgrounds; many people there are exposed to structural disadvantage and racism on account of their origins, their migration status or the colour of their skin. The street as a place where children play and live, together with their chalk drawings, forms a central motif of her photographic work. With a precise eye for gestures, humorous and melancholic moments or performative poses, Levitt captures everyday encounters and fleeting compositions.
Although her photographs convey an apparent closeness to the people they portray, Levitt always remains an observer from outside these communities. Influenced by the ideas of the politically leftist New York Film and Photo League as well as “by the times”, she brings working-class people into focus. Her images move between intimacy and distance while at the same time making visible how social change inscribes itself into the everyday life of the city. From the 1970s onwards, the streets and the subway of New York reflect changes in fashion, consumer culture and urban ways of living – Levitt’s photographs thus become significant visual documents of their time.
In 1941, together with Walker Evans and the writer James Agee, Levitt developed her first publication of photographs from New York, which is finally published in 1965 under the title A Way of Seeing.
In the Street, 1948
From the mid-1940s onward, Helen Levitt collaborated with writer James Agee and artist, director and producer Janice Loeb, on the film In the Street. The experimental short film shows everyday scenes in Spanish Harlem and moves between humorous and almost surreal moments. As in Levitt’s photographs, movement, gesture and the rhythm of street life are central – the street appears as a living stage of everyday life.
Because Levitt films people without intervening, thereby capturing their lives and daily routines directly, In the Street is regarded as a key precursor to the cinéma vérité that emerged in the 1960s. Following its first screening in 1949, In the Street also marks the beginning of a series of film projects that Levitt developed over the following two decades.
Mexico, 1941
Following the example of various European artists and inspired particularly by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt travelled to Mexico in 1941 with a friend. There she photographed people on the streets and the outskirts of Mexico City – with an approach similar to the one she had taken in her home city of New York. Rather than giving herself over to the surrealist motifs of her predecessors, she shows a wide range of moments of human interaction and captures fragments of the city with the eyes of a foreigner. The exhibition presents 13 gelatine silver prints and more than 100 work prints by the artist from this period.
A Pioneer of Colour Photography
In 1959, Helen Levitt received the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships for her
experimentation with “the newest techniques of colour photography”. As in the 1930s and 1940s, she now roams the same districts of New York, but with colour film instead of black-and-white film, and directs her attention more intently towards colour compositions. This early engagement with colour photography makes Levitt one of its pioneers. Many of her early slides were stolen in the 1970s; she nevertheless continues her work with determination and develops an intuitive approach to colour.
