New Eyes on a Familiar City

Photographer Helen Levitt has always been admired in certain circles. Despite a lack of broader appeal, her work, depicting urban scenes in her native New York City, has enjoyed favorable reception among her colleagues for many years; she is, as National Public Radio’s Helen Block once put it, “a photographer’s photographer.” Levitt has also enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence of late, having published a book of her works and having been made the subject of Centre National de la Photographie in Paris in the past year.

One of the many things that strikes a viewer of Levitt’s exquisitely intimate prints is her choice of subject matter. Granted, New York has been documented to such a great extent as to make more examination moderately mundane, but in an era when the American psyche is still preoccupied with the collapse of a major monument, her choices of photographs—taken from the 1960s to the early 1990s—featured in this exhibition are presciently subversive. This is not the New York of towering skyscrapers and frenetic energy. This is not the New York that never seems to lie dormant.

Levitt chronicles the nether-regions and transitory spaces of brown-stone stoops and street corners; she captures the unseen places of sandlots and sidestreets. Her interpretation of the city is an urban sprawl parcelled into discrete little packages. Levitt shuns the easy and trite depictions that populate the popular mind and illuminates street scenes in a manner that is in equal measure gritty and paradoxically poetic.

Several prints on display focused on children, and these ring with the greatest honesty perhaps because the subjects seem completely unaware of the camera’s gaze. In one striking scene, several grade schoolers labor to push a hamper up a dirtied urban avenue. Despite the squalor of the surroundings, their impish smiles and doubled-over laughter show that the activity is more of a game than a chore. In a careful composition, the children’s clothes pick up colors in the graffiti and painted residences in the background, suggesting a unity with their surroundings and an ability to revel even in less-than-pristine circumstances.

My impression may be stretching Levitt’s intent a little, but such is the nature of her artistry. Her ability to capture the unconscious essence of her subject matter almost compels her viewers to construct a past, present and future narrative for all of her prints. Her work is untitled, leaving us to formulate our own caption for the events we see and to attempt to decipher and infer exactly what is going on.

In one print, we would like to divine exactly what is going on inside the head of the drinks vendor who sits on his haunches and stares blankly across the street, and Levitt compels us to imagine the appearance of the unseen woman—or man—whose snow cone-holding hand is all that appears. The print depicts foreground and background people half obscured by a lamp post and a telephone booth, and so, as we wonder, we also revel in the ingenious spontaneity of seemingly unconscious compositions.

The exhibition’s flagship print epitomizes that ingenuity as it depicts the quotidian event of a laborer on the street handling a dolly laden with boxes. Front and center, Levitt constructs a fractured lattice from the box edges, the dolly handles and painted street lines; behind and off to the right, an undulating white canvas runs into a street covering a construction site, thus breaking up that structured rigidity. In the middle background, between the tarpaulin and the worker, cars stream by, having just come out of gridlock. Most unsettling, in the very close left foreground, half a woman’s out-of-focus head protrudes into the image, looking from left to right across the frame. The woman disrupts with her half-head intruding on an otherwise neat and easily digestible composition.

Moreover, Levitt questions a photograph’s focal point. An artist would normally discard a print with such an interruption, but here, it is featured prominently. Simultaneously, Levitt creates as well as breaks geometry with straight and serpentine lines. Immediately, she personalizes and evokes the greater context of the city with her depth of field.

It is this grand scope that makes for the exhibit’s most compelling print. It depicts another street corner, where the camera looks obliquely down a long city street. The image is divided vertically by another grey lamp post; on its right, a pretzel vendor plies his trade while on the left in the foreground a balding, mousy looking man’s face is half-obscured by an enormous brown paper bag. Far in the deep background, yet clearly visible, are the two towers of the World Trade Center. This exhibit was assembled in the wake of Sept. 11, so it cannot but be for conscious choice. Amazingly, Levitt reverses convention and puts the frame’s most monumental element far removed from view—so much so as to render it almost invisible.

In contrast with those expansive views, Levitt also frequently collapses her depth of focus. Brick walls—blank or covered in graffiti—provide frequent backdrops, and for this reason her pictures could truly be anywhere, but they carry a special connotation because the audience knows it is New York. It begs the question: Were these pictures not taken in New York, would they carry the same emotive force? Given the set of ready associations that the city has in our cultural memory, likely not. However, this is Gotham unlike many have ever witnessed. Levitt’s is the New York of people—of stories in the naked city, of personal, simple events of everyday people: a concrete jungle transformed into an urban garden.

visual arts

Helen Levitt

Robert Klein Gallery

38 Newbury St.

Through Mar. 30