Helen Levitt: Childhood as Performance, City as Theater

"The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theater and a battleground."

--James Agee, prologue to the film by Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb,
and James Agee, In the Street ¹

The theatrical battlegrounds Agee describes form the setting for much of Levitt's work in photography and film. The "great city" where she worked was New York City and, in particular, the East Harlem of the late 1930s and early 1940s. The streets of tenements and brownstones she pictured, which have since been replaced by the construction of public housing projects, were vibrant with the dense social interactions beloved by twentieth-century photographers and were exceptionally rich in the encounters of children at play. Helen Levitt is the photographic chronicler of this world, and her images are treasured by critics of photography for their transparency of style (or apparent absence of the imposition of the artist's control upon her subjects). It is this quality that allows the sheer vitality of her subjects to exist in a perennial present tense, as alive and immediate on the page today as when the pictures were made. ²

Levitt's apparently styleless work indeed exemplifies the best that a 35-mm camera (the then newly-invented Leica) can do in the hands of a sensitive observer. But if we look not at the accomplished grace of her method of working but rather at one of her most frequent subjects, we find that Levitt's work is virtually a treatise upon the often unseen real lives of children and their engrossing work of creating their own identities through performative play. Smart, humorous, tough, and unsentimental, possessed of a brilliant eye, Levitt has been more or less continuously active in photography for more than 60 years. Although she tends to dislike interpretive commentary upon her work, it is indisputable that her photographs offer their viewers privileged entry into the private worlds of children who performed and played in the public streets of the city.

One hot summer morning in the early 1940s, two children of approximately kindergarten age were to be found in a quiet side street in upper Manhattan. Delicately outlined by a contour of errant daylight, the girl stretched her arms in earnest arabesque, her weight firmly balanced on one foot while the other, temporarily forgotten, was untidily tucked behind. Beside her, though in shadow, the boy--more solid but slightly smaller--rested one hand on his head and called out as he began to rotate in a less stylized pirouette. ³ Their concentration was unbroken, and the street was curiously empty of traffic and passers-by. The scene had elements of a game, an improvisation, and an impromptu dance lesson. But who is to say that these children were playing? Their concentration is palpable; in fact, they are at work, and their work is performance (see fig. 1). ⁴

I write that these children were "to be found," but that phrase makes several assumptions. The photograph offers us triumphant evidence that they were found, but that is not at all the same as saying that they might have been found by anyone other than a superbly gifted photographer like Helen Levitt, or indeed that anyone else would have been on that street that morning with leisure to look, eyes to see, a camera to record, and the necessary status of unobtrusive observer rather than participant. Helen Levitt's genius as a photographer lies precisely in the moments she "finds" in the city, and the great majority of these offer observations about the nature of childhood, the nature of the city, and indeed of life itself. But just as they aren't serendipitously "found" so much as they are skillfully identified and apprehended by an incisive artist's act, the moments don't depict merely casual occurrences or random gestures.

The children's continuing performances render the streets as not only a theater...