HELEN LEVITT
That Levitt came of age during the Depression may help account for the fact that her images are entirely of working-class and poor people, but there’s no simple explanation for the mysterious and ultimately liberating vision she brings to her subjects. Like all great artists who aspire to create some direct relationship between their art and the external world, she understands (with critic Andre Bazin) that “realism” can be achieved only through “artifice.” Bringing her subjects to life is not simply a matter of pointing a well-focused lens in their direction; it involves careful framing and choice of camera angle.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
These apparently technical details are not merely a matter of a photographer trying to get a certain look. Indeed, Levitt’s images are never pretty, never beautifully composed, never stunning in themselves. She’s not interested in finding images or forms that impress the viewer or express her sensibility; this is not an artist who imposes her vision on the world. Instead Levitt wishes to observe and represent the world in a manner that respects the integrity and autonomy of its citizens and of their expressions, like graffiti. An image that naively “locks in” to the subject, as snapshots and studio portraits do (perhaps not coincidentally, Levitt’s early training was as an assistant to a portrait photographer), creates a kind of simple identity between picture and subject, as if the photograph were a substitute object. Levitt acknowledges that she can never fully know the people she depicts; the distance her asymmetries create returns to each subject an individuality, a certain freedom.
In Levitt’s later work, compositions tend to be even more complex and open to multiple meanings, and at times unpeopled areas seem as expressive as human figures. A 1980 color image shows two people in a street crowded with vehicles, but we see little of their faces and only fragments of the vehicles. A large part of the background is a white cloth covering a Dumpster and part of a building; the cloth prevents debris from building renovation from falling into the street. But though these objects are clearly identifiable, overall the effect is of a collection of fragments, barriers, masks; the lively, organic, inventive poses of children are replaced by a jumble of almost oppressive surfaces, each of which denies entry. In a 1971 color shot, a woman in the foreground walks toward us on a sidewalk; her hat shades her eyes from view. In the middle ground another woman–wearing a different sort of hat that leaves her face visible–looks at the first. The sidewalk in the far background is in deep shadow, shielded from view in a way that echoes the first woman’s hidden eyes. In both images, the barriers to our entry have none of the playfulness of the boy guard; they seem rather the conditions of a more crowded, more brutal city.
Levitt, by contrast, seeks to find in the world images that she loves. Instead of Weston’s closed, formal perfection, her images have a loose, open, suggestive quality. The eye is led in multiple directions; even in an image of a single person, the subject may be looking one way and gesturing in another. Cumulatively Levitt’s off-center compositions, her antiformalist framing, and the off-frame glances of her subjects create in the viewer a sense of unbounded, ever-expanding space, one that imposes no preconceived limits on the human figure.
A similar image from New York (c. 1945) shows four girls on a sidewalk next to a street apparently bordered by a stone wall. The girls are different sizes and shapes and–as is so often true in Levitt’s groups of children–of different races. They all look to the left, at five soap bubbles they have presumably just made; these form a luminous contrast to the heavy, dark wall.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.
