Biography of helen levitt

Helen Levitt was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in and began shooting at the age of She was largely inspired by the most acclaimed photographer of her day, Cartier-Bresson, and after the two were fortunate to meet inshe purchased a 35mm Leica and began to see photography as more than just a hobby. She was immediately drawn to the games of children on the streets of Brooklyn and documented their chalk drawings voraciously.

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Site by Artlogic. American Art. S2CID ISSN JSTOR Archived from the original on March 29, Retrieved July 5, The Economist. April 8, The Telegraph. April 23, Archived from the original on March 17, Retrieved March 11, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Archived from the original on March 22, Archived from the original on December 4, May 29, The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography.

ISBN Retrieved July 24, — via Google Books. Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Phillips, Sandra S. Helen Levitt. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 12, Retrieved December 11, Archived PDF from the original on April 12, Retrieved September 15, International Center of Photography. January 31, Retrieved December 5, A Way of Seeing.

New York: Horizon Press. Museum of Modern Art. If it were easy to talk about, I'd be a writer. Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images. Children rule the streets in this film, as the sequences jump between shots of them playing, laughing, and crying to scenes of adults absorbed in their own lives. The juxtaposition between adults and children heightens both the spontaneous joy and cruelty of childhood.

Throughout the film, the adults appear seemingly unaware of the fantastical reality the children have crafted for themselves.

Biography of helen levitt

The scenes that comprise this 16 minute film range from shots of kids in Halloween costumes, donning skeleton masks made of paper, kids waging a battle with fistfuls of flour, which splash across the black and white film like magic, to adults peacefully walking their dogs or conversing with their neighbors. Refusing a linear, or even singular, narrative in the film, Helen Levitt's cinematography is a moving extension of the spontaneous aesthetic she mastered in her still images.

The film jumps between scenes and places seemingly at random, but always with a lyrical flow. Just as soon as one scene is established, the film jumps to another scene entirely. In the introduction to this film a text reads, "The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theater and a battleground. There, unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer: and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence.

The attempt in this short film is to capture this image. Shot mostly in Harlem and the Lower East Side, the film's unique composition echoes Agee's sentiment that the streets are both a theater as well as a battleground. The legacy of documentary filmmaking at the time typically imposed a singular and heroic narrative that both Levitt and Agee saw as reducing the raw energy and complexity of everyday life.

While the film was received as a documentary, both Agee and Levitt resisted that category in both Agee's script as well as in Levitt's shooting of it. As the film studies scholar Juan Antonio Suarez says of the film, it "eschews the stereotyping and sentimentalizing typical of much s documentary work, where characters are viewed in terms of wider social groups, as stand-ins.

In this photograph, the brightly colored background of torn billboards announcing various boxing bouts frames an otherwise drab and vacant lot. A man sits in front of his empty cart, talking to a small child, while two other men just behind them talk. The dirty heaps of used clothing imply the hard work of their daily lives, and also create a barrier between the street and the vacant lot, so that the space seems to belong to the men.

This image was made when Levitt received a highly regarded grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to record scenes from the poor and working class neighborhoods of New York City in color. It is one of eight surviving images from this time period because in her color negatives and prints from this project were stolen from her apartment, never to resurface.

Color photography was in its early stages during this time, and had been previously looked down upon by serious photographers - Walker Evans declared that color photography was "vulgar. In this image, Levitt uses color to highlight both the poverty as well as the humanity of the scene - the brightly pops of color contrast starkly with the dingy blankets and detritus, and even the people in the abandoned lot.

All of this merely sets the stage for what really interested her: the humanity and familiarity between people. In this image, an African American woman talks to an African American man pushing his hot dog cart, named "House of Weenies," down a littered city street. Behind them, a BBQ sign hangs over the entrance of shuttered building, and a billboard advertises the radio show "Yankee Baseball and Bill White.

The decaying urban landscape conveys the historical weight of poverty, but a sense of wry humor prevails in the interaction between the woman who seems quite sure of whatever she's talking about, staring ahead as she walks, and the man who turns to look at her askance. His quizzical look speaks to Levitt's proclivity towards humor and wit.

The man's pristine white coat and his hot dog cart with its two signs suggest that he takes pride in ownership. Food carts were a relatively new invention and something that would have been unique to major cities. This image stands in remarkable contrast to her earlier photographs, despite the similar subject matter for both its brilliant full color as well as the modernity represented by the billboards and the hot dog cart.

The New York of was dramatically different than the New York of the s, when Levitt first began photographing. The broad scope of time in which Levitt worked revealed both the constant change of the 21 st century but also an enduring and timeless biography of helen levitt about the nature of human life. In this photograph, a girl crouches in the gutter of a street with legs akimbo, with her head lowered to her right knee.

The brilliant Kelly green of the car directly behind the girl and the turquoise beetle create a lyrical balance of color, for which Levitt's color images were known. The cuff of the girl's shirt matches the white wall of the tire, which leads up to the curved green of the wheel well and the bright color of the car, then to the blue of the Beetle and a patch of blue wall above two trash cans in the right background.

The color is so choreographed that the setting seems almost deliberately composed, which further emphasizes the mystery of the girl's biography of helen levitt. Most of Levitt's photos focus on human movement, as a telling gesture expresses the subject's personality, but in her color work, she often focused on moments of disconnection. We cannot see the girl's face, and as a result of this, her emotional state is hidden from us and her awkward positioning suggests she is looking for something that is equally hidden from her.

An ordinary setting thus becomes ambiguous. Encompassing both the spontaneity as well as the Surrealist elements for which her work was known, this color image explains why Levitt was known as "New York's visual poet Laureate. Levitt's expansive career was full of starts and stops, switching from black and white photography to film and then back to photography in order to experiment with color film.

However, the strength of her images withstands the test of time, as her later work remains as fascinating and fresh as her earliest photographs. This speaks to Levitt's expansive legacy and her unique vision of the world around her. Helen Levitt was born in Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in She had two brothers and was the middle child.

Her father Sam ran a wholesale knit goods store and her mother May was a bookkeeper. As a child, Levitt studied ballet even though she was born with Meniere's syndrome, an inner-ear disease that causes dizziness and tinnitus, as she said in later years, "I have felt wobbly all my life. Her love of these art forms gave her a deep appreciation of human movement and the telling gesture.

Her immigrant background and love of humor and spontaneity would later come to define her approach to both photography and filmmaking. As a teenager, Levitt wanted to be an artist but felt she "could not draw well. She then went to work for a commercial photographer that her mother knew in the Bronx. She worked in the darkroom printing and developing.

From her six dollar a week salary, she saved up enough money to buy a used Voigtlander camera, and began taking black and white photographs of her mother's friends. Never receiving a formal education, she educated herself by attending exhibitions and reading publications on the work of Ben Shahn and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She was influenced by the grittiness of Shahn's street photographs, and Cartier-Bresson made her realize that, as she said, "I decided I should take pictures of working class people and contribute to the movements