Nigel Walker - The Photography Blog: January 2021

Helen Levitt was a native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn in 1913, and remained in the city until her death aged 95 in 2009. A quiet and introspective woman who never married she rarely sought fame or fortune but spent nearly seventy years photographing the streets of the city. She dropped out of school and learned to develop photographs in a darkroom before starting work for the commercial photographer J Florian Mitchell.

She first realised that photography could be art as well as commercial when she visited and exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Julien Levy Gallery. The show influenced her work for many years and she began using her mother's friends as models using a second-hand Voigtlander camera. She even met Cartier-Bresson in New York and spent a day shooting on the streets with him later in life as her reputation was established.

Teaching children art in the mid-1930's she became interested in the chalk drawings many drew on the streeets at the time and started photographing them with her new Leica. The results were not published until 1987 in a book "In The Street: chalk drawings and messages NYC 1938-1948". But her interest in street photography was born and she continued taking pictures in the Manhatten districts. The lack of TV and air conditioning meant that people lived a large part of their lives on the streets. Later she would bemoan the loss of children outdoors saying "Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something".

Her work was first published in Fortune magazine in 1939 and she received a grant from MOMA in 1946. Meeting the photographer James Agee through Walker Evans she was persuaded to try colour and from the 1950's onward shot in both colour and black and white feeling equally at ease with both. This pioneering work in colour was recognised by the Guggenheim Foundation in 1959 and 1960. Yet, while she had a strong reputation she remained pretty much unknown outside the photographic world and rarely gave interviews or talked about her work or motivations.

By 1965 her first major publication "A Way of Seeing" was published. Sadly much of her colour work up to this time was stolen in a burglary of her apartment in 1970. Arguably her most influential work was not published until 2005, "Slide Show: The Colour Photographs of Helen Levitt". She became a Fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts in America in 1976 and in 1988 a peer award from The Friends of Photography in California. Less known and recognised was the work she undertook on films, mainly documnetary, which included editing with Luis Bunuel.

Her reputation grew during the 1990's and into the 21st Century and she is now recognised as one of the leading street photographers of her time and a pioneer of colour work and of the New York School of photographers alongside Saul Leiter and William Eggleston. Sadly, like many women photographers she has had to wait quite a while for her reputation to grow and for her work to now be collected and feted with retrospectives. Luckily for us (pandemic allowing) we will be able to see her work at the Photographers Gallery in November 2021 https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/