Helen Levitt

One of the biggest misconceptions of so-called street photography is that it can serve as a descriptor of the world (mostly cities) at large. It simply can’t any more (or less) than the rest of photography. What it can do, though, is to serve as an expression of specific cultural notions, especially in the context of the mid to late 20th Century in the United States.

If you have followed my writing over the years, you will have noticed that I’ve mostly ignored street photography. It’s not that I mind it. It’s just that it mostly doesn’t speak to me, and its peak moment has also long gone. As a genre, street photography today is incapable of speaking to the larger moment we’re finding ourselves in. In any case, the photographic conversation has long moved on.

Street photographers are typically seen and treated as artists. Artists do not reproduce the world faithfully. In fact, that’s exactly why we look to art: not because it shows us something we can all see (or feel), but rather because it does the very opposite (assuming it is well done).

Ignoring the machismo that has been running through the genre (another reason why I don’t spent time with street photography), I mostly find the conversations around this passé photographic genre lacking: Street photographers are not simply masters who magically line up the spectacle of city life in their frames. If they were only that, street photography would be little more than an exercise in photographic formalism (which, granted, a lot of it is).

Instead, street photographers project their own vision onto the world around them, and in that they’re not any different than other artists. But it’s difficult to detect what exactly that vision is if you look at the discourse, which is dominated by rather dated cultural references and by now equally dated ideas of cities themselves.

The aforementioned machismo has also influenced how we look at street photography as a photohistorical genre. But history is not set in stone. It can be corrected and re-written, and in part, this is happening with and inside Helen Levitt, a newly published book around this particular photographer.

Speaking of Levitt’s photographs, “they give us a feminist vision of urban life,” Elizabeth Gand argues in one of its essays (p. 19). And there are additional aspects to them, in particular in the photographs of children taken in Harlem. It’s interesting to me how the various sources Gand quotes project their own ideas onto the photographs — and, inevitably, the photographer; as does this writer herself.

But I personally would insist on seeing the photographer more than those whose faces and bodies she captured in the streets. Here is the thing about photography: a photograph is made with intent. The moment it is presented, there are layers of additional intent heaped upon it: it has been processed (whether in a darkroom or in front of a computer), and it has been consciously selected and placed into a specific context.

All of the decisions that go into the presentation of a photograph add up to if not conceal but at least diminish its actual information. “A portrait is not a likeness,” Richard Avedon once wrote, “the moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.” This is why people often do not recognize themselves in the portraits taken of them by a stranger: they’re made to face someone else’s opinion, not their own.

Avedon’s statement is not only true for portraits, it’s true for almost all photographs (except, perhaps, passport ones). And that is how and why photography can be art, because a photograph says more about its maker than about what it shows.

A skilled photographer such as Levitt is able to distill her own vision into a view of the world that masquerades as one thing (the world) but that is quite another (the photographer’s opinion as expressed through fragments taken from that world).

In Levitt’s vision, the urban life she faced often enough comes across as hostile, with its protagonists — the people in front of her camera — making do with what they have to deal with the best they can.

Children are particularly adept at doing this, given that they combine a general sense of open playfulness with an unawareness of the unfairness that might be driving why their environs look the way they do: the stage is set, and thus the play unfolds.

One of Levitt’s well-known photographs, a colour one taken in 1976, shows a young girl suspended between a shiny green car and the curb. It would appear that she is looking at something below her (the viewer can’t tell). In order to get closer, she crouched down and contorted her body in ways that evoke scenes from contemporary Japanese horror movies, in which the threshold between the human world and the world inhabited by wrathful spirits is defined by how a person might comport their body.

This particular photograph sits at at our own very real threshold between the world as it is (because that’s how it should be) and the world as it treats us (which people rather not talk about). In many of Levitt’s photographs, that threshold becomes amplified through the many contortions of bodies.

Many people deserve better living conditions than the ones they are finding themselves in. Too often, we take a world that is hostile by design for granted simply we accept to be told to keep our heads down. Helen Levitt captures people’s struggle under such conditions.

In addition, there is a lot of looking in Levitt’s photographs. But it’s not a looking at something, it’s a looking away from something or from one another. Navigating a largely hostile world requires keeping to oneself, in particular if one happens to be one of those people who do not share in the brutal machismo that drives one’s living conditions.

Helen Levitt is a handsome book that gives this particular photographer the recognition she has long deserved. A wealth of added material (essays, film still, some contact sheets) provides further insight into her work.

Even as I feel that the emotions and opinions expressed in Helen Levitt’s work deserve to be brought out a lot more in the essays, in the end, it’s the photographs that do the talking. For those willing and able to look — and to listen — there is much to take in.

Helen Levitt; edited by Joshua Chang; with additional contributions by Elizabeth Gand, Lauren Graves, Monica Bravo, Freya Field-Donovan, Anne Bertrand, and Joel Sternfeld; 304 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2026

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The more I know about photography and the more I have become comfortable making my own photographs, the more I feel the need to experience its interactions with other human activities in which the reality that surrounds us is captured in some fashion.

As a visual person, I tend to think of the world first and foremost as being captured in images — short/brief fragments out of that much larger flow that we will never fully grasp. On their own, photographs can only do so much. But accompanied by something else — whether words, other non-photographic images, or other human artifacts — photographs’ deficiencies not only fall away: they become irrelevant.

For a long time, I thought that talent was driving art making. But talent is irrelevant without execution.

Then, I thought it was passion. But, again, passion is irrelevant without execution (and unlike talent, passion can be faked).

Now, I know that if anything matters in art, it’s the urgency felt by the person making something. Urgency knows no bounds. With bounds urgency ceases to exist — much like thirst vanishes after a drink.

This is what I am looking for in art: I want to feel that someone wants to urgently tell me something, something that cannot wait, something that cannot be fully expressed but that needs to be expressed regardless. That’s why I have no patience any longer for photographers illustrating ideas with pictures: it’s not the illustration part I mind (as bad as it is), it’s the complete lack of urgency behind it.

If you feel urgency behind your expression, you’re unable to illustrate. Illustrating your own pain, your suffering, your joy, your exuberance falls so short of conveying it — even though you will never reach it, you still want to reach out for that larger expression beyond illustration.

Charlotte Dumas‘ Entendue is a collaboration after the fact, the fact here being the collaborator’s death — and the collaborator being the photographer’s late father, himself a graphic artist and painter. For the collaboration, Dumas used one of her father’s cameras, and she included some of her father’s drawings and sketches alongside her own photographs and drawings.

With so much of this photographer’s work being centered on animals, the subjects of the book — elephants — will come as no surprise. “When I was a child,” she writes, “my father would take me to Diergaarde Bijdorp, the zoo in Rotterdam and we’d sketch the elephants together.”

In the book, the elephants are being sketched together by these two artists again, one final time.

In her words, Dumas speaks forcefully of her hope that the work may guide people to “a deeper understanding of humans and elephants”. I don’t know whether photographs or drawings can do that.

What these photographs and drawings do, though, is to speak of the urgency felt when making the work, putting it together, and releasing it into the world. One final collaboration between a father and his daughter.

Faced with photographs or drawings, comprehension must inevitably fail at some point. No photograph will be able to convey the truth of the world to us. The best anyone can hope for is for it to convey fragments of a truth.

But we want to understand even as we know that we will not be able to, especially when faced with the cruelest of experiences, the loss of a loved one.

Death is the ultimate entity that will forever separate us from what we know and what we hope we might know.

So even though you could approach the book and hope to learn more about elephants, to understand better how to relate to them, I would probably suggest to simply feel the emotions that run through the pages of this book.

That’s the thing about that urgency I spoke of above: it’s impossible to put it into the pictures, but it’s equally impossible to hide it from the pictures.

Grief can take many forms and is impossible to control; but it can also result in deeply meaningful art being made — as is the case here.

Entendue; photographs and drawings by Charlotte and Peter Dumas; short text by Charlotte Dumas; 64 pages; FW:Books; 2025

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