Street Photographer Helen Levitt’s Unweepy Social Realism

Her photos capture rambunctious life in gritty New York neighborhoods.

I’ m in Paris now, but for a week I was among the few Americans in London. That said, totems of America were plentiful. I saw two very good exhibitions on American artists. I wrote about the Helen Frankenthaler woodcut show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery earlier this week. Today I’ll write about the Helen Levitt retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery, In the Street, recognizing Levitt (1913–2009) as one of America’s earliest street photographers.

I liked the exhibition. Levitt is probably the best least-known photographer of her era and one of the few social-realist artists who wasn’t a weepy, obvious bore. Far from it. The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho is London’s pioneer art space for photography. Its 50th anniversary was last year. The gallery started showing photography when it was a marginalized medium in the U.K., and it often highlights American artists. In the Street is part of its celebration of itself, and it deserves it. There’s always something good to see there.

And there’s a Britain-to-America émigré back in London. After a hundred years at the Huntington in San Marino in sunny California, The Blue Boy, by Gainsborough, is on view at the National Gallery. This is the first time the Huntington has even lent it. When Henry Huntington bought it in London in 1921, it was the most famous and expensive painting in the English-speaking world. Its exit so bruised English pride that King George V tried to persuade dealer Joseph Duveen to find a local buyer. I’ll write about the painting and the National Gallery display next week.

American themes seemed very present on more fronts. I love the theater, and before I left, I got a ticket to see a show about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. In the mid 1920s, these rich, young Chicago men were so besotted by Nietzsche they concocted what they believed were perfect crimes, subversions so subtle in plan and execution that they’d baffle the lesser minds among the Chicago police. They considered themselves intellectual and moral supermen. Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about them — Rope. The play’s at the Jermyn Street Theater, a tiny place that always has something provocative.

After lots of modest thrill crimes, Leopold and Loeb, gay lovers and demented ones at that, kidnapped and murdered a teenager. They weren’t as smart as they thought. Even the Chicago police, suborned and diminished as they were by bootleggers, nailed them. Clarence Darrow famously — and purportedly — saved them from the noose, though in reality the men’s connected fathers, practicing the Chicago Way, bribed the judge.

The show was good. I didn’t realize it was a musical, though. I’m all for star-crossed lovers turned tuneful, but Leopold and Loeb? English theater still dares to stun but, alas, only sometimes. Most of the shows in London are gaudy retreads of American musicals.

Back to Levitt and street photography. The genre is self-explanatory — outdoor scenes of everyday life at their most impromptu — and entirely comfortable in the trajectory of American art. America has no aristocracy or ecclesiastic master class. It’s an egalitarian country, and our default aesthetic is realism, not only the accurate and straightforward conveyance of a motif without too much fluff but a curiosity about how real people live. Think George Caleb Bingham’s Jolly Flatboatman, Homer’s fishermen, hunters, and bourgeois beach babes, and Eakins’s rowers. The Ashcan School of Henri, Sloan, Bellows, and Luks emerges from this heritage.

American photographers evolve alongside painters with a twist. They’re out and about since their subjects, aside from people wanting portraits, aren’t in the studio. Mathew Brady might have moved bodies of Civil War soldiers to get the poses he wanted, but he was indeed working in what was very recently an active battlefield. Alfred Stieglitz and Jacob Riis composed subjects with a spare, Modernist look in mind, but immigrants in steerage or children in factories were the stuff of real life.

Levitt pushed art further toward the ungussied truth. She was born in Brooklyn and learned about photography on her own or through working for Walker Evans. Her subjects are almost entirely outdoors and in Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side, two of the grittiest working-class neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Her first photographs were of chalk graffiti on pavement, shot in the late 1930s. On the one hand, they’re charming and predictable, flat profiles of a cop shooting his pistol, a smoking gangster moll shooting hers, a kissing couple, both wearing cowboy hats, and a frank announcement on rough brownstone that “a detective lives here.” On the other, they’re spartan and glyphic. They’re fun and feral. Unregulated minds are at work, artists appropriating whatever canvas they can find. Cowboy, gangster, and detective stories were the stuff of popular culture, in movies and comic books.

Levitt’s children at play are charming, too, but not sweet, not cloying. The first word in my mind when I looked at these works was “autonomous.” A photograph of five boys using a double door’s massive architectural surround for play is one of the best things in the exhibition. Levitt’s photographs have presence. She finds what’s spacious in a dense urban setting. Whatever game these kids play, and it looks like an improv battle, they’re in command. They take possession. They’re entrepreneurial, too, thriving in dirty or otherwise useless spaces.

Levitt’s playacting photographs show masked kids, too. Not the masks that kids are forced to wear today in the child-abuse rituals disguised as Covid hygiene, but masks used for masquerade. Levitt presents us with a Venetian carnival, New York–style and enacted by children.

Levitt’s subjects are emphatically unoppressed. They’re not sad, they don’t think of themselves as victims, they take risks and don’t wear helmets. Levitt said in an interview that her work in the 1930s was informed by “Communism, Socialism, whatever was the new thing.” For a Brooklyn Jew, this was standard social philosophy, vague, and, by the ’40s and ’50s, not a useful way to look at her work. “Social Surrealism in the Streets,” by Douglas Forbes, is the lead essay in the very good, succinct catalogue. It’s a well-written stab at presenting Levitt’s child at play as “the subversive figure of bourgeois modernity, full of transgressive possibility.” Play, as Levitt presents it, unfolds in opposition to capitalism, or that’s Forbes’s take. She “forges an aesthetic politics that condenses agency and desire, dream and reality, the felt transmission of modernism’s contradictions.” This, he says, is part of American Surrealism.

This is very woolly indeed. The exhibition unfolding in the galleries doesn’t do anything with this, and smartly so. In the Street might as well be called “In the Moment,” since that’s the aesthetic and emotional essence of Levitt’s work. Children at play isn’t a new theme in American art, either. It’s a staple starting in the 1870s. America’s a young country, so the doings of young people are an interest. The post-1945 baby boom is far from our first. The post–Civil War baby machine was one more field of mass production.

Levitt’s subjects are about evenly divided between children and adults, though her depictions of children started her career. The best black-and-white photographs of adults come in two categories. Levitt and Evans were the first to photograph people on the New York subway. Evans, conscious of his role as a Modernist theorist, tends to give us more composed, even monumental figures. Levitt’s are authentic blobs, but blobs with quirky character. Her adults photographed on the streets of New York aren’t active, as are her child subjects, but onlookers, some looking very prosaic indeed while others affect what for them is high style. None of her subjects is part of a lumpen mass. Each figure has individuality as well as pliability. Her figures, stretching to reach, bending, jumping, or even pausing, are never static.

I watched Levitt’s 14-minute long In the Street documentary, released in 1952, though much of her filming work in Spanish Harlem happened in the late ’40s. Black and white and set to nervous, waggish piano music, her cast of still-photography characters comes to life. Levitt obviously admired Charlie Chaplin but probably Our Gang, too, though life is slummier and moves faster in In the Street. It’s a classic film.

Levitt supported herself as a film editor. In the late ’50s, she moved her art into color photography. A sensitively installed gallery shows her different style. Color meant more attention to composition and design, and less to action and narrative, since a red car door or a lavender necktie can, by itself, steal the show. I thought about John Chamberlain’s crushed metal sculptures as I looked at Levitt’s photographs from this period. There are moments of humor, but the images are studies of color planes and shapes. These photographs tend to be bigger, too. Levitt’s black-and-white street scenes are small. They feel like snapshots, although Levitt did do some staging. They suggest that the viewer is looking through a peephole.

Her color work is very good but more static and less gestural. Levitt admitted that as she got older, she saw more magic in patterns. For Levitt and other photographers working in color, processing became not their work but the work of color labs, some good, some not-so-good, but all expensive.

In the Street is on two floors of the gallery. There’s a short, straightforward introductory panel for each section and a small niche each for viewing Levitt’s 1952 documentary and for her published photography books.

I would have made far more fuss over the gallery’s history, since it’s a big anniversary.

There’s space dedicated to posters for past shows and a video, but I wanted something more spacious and pointed. In the ’70s and into the ’90s, the Photographers’ Gallery was the only game in town for serious photography. By showing living artists, the space built many wonderful careers.

Levitt has had a lot of exhibitions, among them a retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna in 2018. Even the Photographers’ Gallery did a survey show, though in 1988. I don’t mind this. London audiences haven’t seen her work for a long time. The catalogue’s a good read, even Forbes’s essay, as grandiose and abstruse as it is.

Levitt wasn’t a star artist until the ’90s. She’s a woman, and that handicapped her among critics and curators, and since much of her work depicts children, she was regarded as a niche artist. Unfair and incorrect assessments, I know. She lived and died in Manhattan, a quiet, reserved woman. For a long time, she was overshadowed by New Deal photographers of the Farm Security Administration, such as Evans and Dorothea Lange, and by Robert Frank’s The Americans, though Levitt is as good if not better. Her work is more visceral and spontaneous. There’s very little pathos in it. I’ve always thought that she’s a wonderful artist, not flashy but a smart, honest visionary. I hadn’t seen her work for a while, though. I entered the exhibition thinking, “Is she as good as I remember? Does she still hold up?” The answer’s “yes” to both, and that makes for a gratifying, solid exhibition. What a classy way to honor this distinguished gallery’s birthday.