Street Photography
Over the last few years I developed a deep passion for the artistic genre and the history of Street Photography. As an avowed New York City fan I would like to show a cutout of the amazing work of the US-American photographer and filmmaker Helen Levitt, one of the key representatives of New York Street Photography.
What does the art ‘street photography’ exactly mean? In contrast to the self-portrayal and self-staging celebrated today via selfies and on social media channels like Instagram and TikTok, street photo-graphy focuses on the depiction of social life. Even if going back to the late 1800s when the first photographs of Paris and its suburbs were recorded, however it experienced its first heyday in the 1930s with the advent of a totally new technology of cameras and the arise of illustrated magazines, from France to the world.
Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009) began to devote herself to photography in 1936. Originally inspired by Magnum photographer Henri Cartier-Benson, a French pionieer in this art, she captured daily life of residents in the poor neighbourhoods of her native New York city as Harlem and the Bronx with a 35-mm Leica camera, thus revolutionizing traditional reportage photography.
Different to her colleagues who intended to show social injustices, Helen Levitt, always with an eye for humorous details, depicted playing children and interacting adults in dynamic snapshots of daily scenes. Influenced by surrealism and silent film, taking the street as stage, she documented everyday culture of those people whereof she understood photography as artistic means of expression combining everyday experience with aesthetic know-how.
In 1938, the artist took a series of pictures of passengers of the New York subway with a hidden camera. Carried under her coat, the shutter release cable in her bag, she portraited them feeling themselves unobserved, the special charm of these secret shoots. 40 years later, when Helen Levitt again portraited people in the subway, she did it with a camera visible to them. Certainly an artistic approach which meets the ethical and even legal demands of our modern times.
In 1945/1946 Helen Levitt shot the documentary In the Street, the first of her film projects closely related to her photographic work. Like a spectacle on the stage, the film shows everyday activities of people living in Spanish Harlem. In 2006, the documentary was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as ‘culturally, historically and aesthetically significant’.
In her second creative period as a photographer, namely since 1959, Helen Levitt involved with color. Again a pioneer of that genre, color marked now another approach to her motifs. More static her works were composed by color contrasts, thus becoming an autonomous artistic means of expression. Different than in the past up from the 1970s Helen not only took pictures of places she preferred in the past but shifted even more to districts like Lower East Side.
