Helen Levitt - fifty years of New York street photography

 

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/ 

You can see more on her life and work on these sites :-

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/helen-levitt-helen-levitt-new-york-streets-1938-to-1990s

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/helen-levitt?all/all/all/all/0 

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A favourite photograph

 

Sometimes people ask me if I have a favourite photograph among all those I have taken. Of course I have many. I recall ones of my children and especially one taken in Normandy around 1994, them walking ahead of me aged 2 and four holding hands as the sun cast a wonderful glow on the summer lane that evening. I have pictures of friends, some now passed away and of places which help me recall events. I also have photographs which were challenging in one way or another or required a lot of planning or else happened right in front of me that I captured out of good luck rather than any skill. It is surprising to me how much I can recall about the circumstances of photographs taken many years ago when all else about the circumstance or place has been forgotten.

 

But if pressed then I always come back to this picture which was taken in Liverpool around 2010. It is fairly nondescript although as an architectural picture it has some merit in balance, compositional terms and colour. The reflective surface helps, but it has a more significant memory and a holds a metaphor for me as well.

Not only is Liverpool a sea-faring city but my father was a seaman, working for Shell all his life. This building, which rears like the prow of a massive ship with a seagull flying past in the glowing clouds, reminds me of that. It stands at the edge of an old graving dock next to Albert Dock, much gentrified in recent years and certainly an improvement on when I used to crawl under fencing to access the old warehouses with my camera in my late teens. 

The area is called Mann Island and in the late 1960's a prefabricated hut stood on the site which served as the offices of the British Shipping Federation. This was a sort of benevolent society which paid seaman an allowance when they were "between ships" and waiting to go to sea again. For whatever reason their pay was allowed alongside any unemployment benefit they could claim for being out of work. So in a corner of the BSF office was a small area which served as an office of The Ministry of Labour - as it was still called then - and I worked there with a couple of other people calculating and making the weekly benefit payments to the around 200 or so seaman each week. I was 17 and it was a fun time. Poetry and music abounded in the pubs and clubs, Penny Lane became famous, and All You Need Is Love was all you needed at a party along with a Party Seven of Worthington Special. Alan Ginsberg had even declared the city the centre of the universe in a recent visit!

   It might be offices now (and house the lovely Open Eye photography gallery) but for me it is the prow of that proud ship, reflecting a past as well as the noisy seagull of my youth and with its open windows looking like portholes, It reminds me that time sails on. 

I had a great time that year and it helped make me who I am and yet, it is an ordinary photograph which no-one else might look at more than once or twice........

Don McCullin - His exhibition at Tate Liverpool (Sept 20 - May 21)

 

Don McCullin is arguably the best known living photographer in Britain today. Few can come close to either his output or the scope of his work. Now in his mid-eighties and still working hard he has covered most genres in his work as a photojournalist and in his own, more gentle work, in later age.

Born into a deprived childhood in London he left school at fifteen and later did his National Service in the RAF, where he discovered photography. and saved for his first Rolleicord camera. Back in London he photographed some local gang members in a bombed out building and was advised to send the pictures to The Observer who promptly published them, setting him on his road through photojournalism, initially with The Sunday Times. He covered homelessness in London, Northern Ireland during The Troubles, The Biafran famine, civil war in Cyprus and most famously Vietnam where his reflective, frank, hard-hitting style caught people's imagination. During this period his attention was always on the people involved, the storytelling, narrative aspects of the situation.

Since then he has photographed the Beatles, travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East where he recorded the ruins of Palmyra prior to ISIS decimating the site (which he later returned to with Dan Cruikshank the historian to record the damage caused for a TV programme) become a CBE and been knighted. A 2012 documentary McCullin by David and Jacqui Morris was nominated for two Baftas.

He now lives in Somerset and has been recording much of his local area in his landscapes which he says "My landscapes are dark. People say: “Your landscapes are almost bordering on warscapes.” I’m still trying to escape the darkness that’s inside me. There’s a lot of darkness in me. I can be quite jovial and jokey and things like that, but when it comes down to the serious business of humanity, I cannot squander other people’s lives." That says much for the humanity of a man who has seen the worst of the world.

Now a new exhibition shows his amazing Tate Britain Retrospective from 2019 at Tate Liverpool. The show opens on 16th September 2020 and runs until 9th May 2021. Tickets must be purchased online and are timed so that the one-way system to help deal with Covid works for the safety of all. Over 250 works assembled over 60 years and all printed by McCullin in his darkroom are on display. Despite visiting the show in Londo I am keen to see it again and look forward to a visit during the run.

Five of the best - World Photography Day

August 19 is World Photography Day, a day to pay homage to the history of photography, celebrate the present and leave a positive trail for the future. World Photography Day originates from the invention of the daguerreotype, a photographic processes developed by Louis Daguerre. It is arguable as to whether Louis Daguerre got there first but he was certainly a very early bird in the photography stakes.

By now it is estimated that over 20 billion photographs are taken every year throughout the world. That is a lot. In fact if you looked at each one for a second it would take you 636 years (less a couple of days) to see them all. We don't have that much time of course which means we will only be able to see a fraction of the photographs taken.

So to celebrate I have decided to help you and show you five photogrpahs that have caught me eye this year. I hope that you like them. 

The one at the top by the way was taken by Amdad Hossain and was a winner in the photojournalist stakes, of a homeless woman in Bangladesh and reminded me of how lucky I was.

Russian photographer Oleg Ershov took this picture which was a winner of the International Landscape Photographer of the year recently. He took it in Cumbria, which shows that us Britons don't have to go far to find winning pictures - we just have to see them...

British photographer Sam Rowley captured these squabbling mice on the London Underground to win the Lumix wildlife prize...again showing that what is around us can be a winner.

This architectural phot by Hazel Parreno of Hintze Hall at the Natural History Museum also caught my eye. It's simplicity belies the detail within the picture.

Last but not least is this picture which won the Birdlife section of the British Photography Awards. It was taken by Kathryn Cooper. It may not be obvious what it is a picture of so here is what Kathryn says of it :- 

"A small group of starlings lead the way as the entire flock surges overhead. In a new take on long exposure photography, I capture short bursts of frames and use my own simple algorithm to flatten them into a single image in post processing. I find that insights emerge from the resulting images that traditional long exposure techniques are not sharp enough to capture. I studied the mathematics of natural phenomena such as murmurations and avalanches during my doctorate and have found the process of turning this flock behaviour into art quite fascinating. This image was taken at RSPB Old Moor in Yorkshire, UK. I visited the reserve several times during the winter of 2018/19 to refine this technique and capture the fluid motion of the starlings. Visitors are lucky enough to be able to stand directly underneath the starlings' flight path and the noise of so many birds moving as one is phenomenal."

All pictures used in this Blog are copyright of the photographers who took them.

Photo London exhibition - 7th - 11th October 2020

Photo London   7th - 11th October 2020 

As cultural life staggers back into some sort of normality plans for this years' Photo London continue to be laid. Taking place in the largest privately owned gardens in London (Gray's Inn Gardens off Chancery Road). 

Hopefully we will still be free to travel and mingle, albeit in a socially distanced and masked sort of way, by the time it arrives. I certainly admire their faith in taking this, the sixth, forward at such an uncertain and difficult time, but the site allows for careful control over the admission and exit of visitors as well as allowing plenty of space and thus reasonably assured safety.

Galleries and publishers from across the world will be taking part and Nikon are partnering up as sponsors. Further announcements are to be made over the summer.

More information and the ability to sign up for their newletter can be found here :-

https://photolondon.org/overview/