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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