Photographer Now the Subject, Finally

At age 88, Helen Levitt is losing her fight against fame.

For the past 35 years, the New York street photographer led a carefully private life in a modest apartment, four flights up in a Greenwich Village brownstone. Her pictures, celebrated by critics as a uniquely unvarnished record of New York life, settled in the important American museums, while she famously declined invitations to interpret her work. She gave almost no interviews, and her visitors--an exclusive subset of the New York art world--were long-standing and protective friends.

But in recent months, as the world groped for insight into the essence of New York, attention landed repeatedly on Levitt’s iconic street scenes. Fifty-nine years after she received a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Levitt is the new toast of the town.

The “supreme poet-photographer of the streets and people of New York,” as the New Yorker magazine put it in November; “one of the living treasures of New York,” declared the New York Times.

The flurry of praise has been fanned by the coincidental release of “Crosstown” (PowerHouse), the largest collection of Levitt’s work. The book stretches from her tender images of Spanish Harlem in the 1930s--children playing in the water of an opened hydrant, teenagers flirting on a townhouse stoop--to the tragicomic bustle of the near-bankrupt city in the 1970s. Together, they reflect her singular vision of New York: a city defined best in minor mysteries and gestures, where women gossip while leaning out of apartment windows so often that they place pillows on the frames and old men are caught ogling store mannequins.

After 60 years of insisting her images speak for themselves, Levitt permits occasional visitors these days, as long as they promise to talk loudly and not to pose the most noxious question of all: What do the pictures mean?

“I never intend to make statements in my pictures,” she said one recent afternoon, fingering a small glass of sherry, as rain pounded the street outside.

“When you are doing street work, you don’t have to talk to people.”

It is not that Levitt does not like to talk. She just prefers that it be about something other than her. The feeling runs deeper than privacy, reflecting a fundamental aversion to pretense, the belief that good things can be ruined with fancy explanations.

“People say, ‘What does this or that mean?’ And I don’t have a good answer for them. You see what you see,” she says.

Padding lightly around the apartment she shares with her cat, Binky Levitt wears a purple sweatshirt and a light silk scarf around her neck. Her hair is styled in a cropped brown pageboy. Her smile is warm but hard-won; she rewards jokes that are good.

Though she has produced thousands of images since first picking up a camera in 1936, there are none to be found on the walls of her home.

Asked about her favorite piece of art, Levitt folds back the narrow door of her galley kitchen to reveal a small cutout copy of a painting by Jean-Simeon Chardin, the 18th century Frenchman known for pioneering scenes of everyday life.

“Isn’t this beautiful?” she says. “So simple.”

Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the middle of three children. Her older brother, Robert, who died in 1998, went on to become a physician and chief of medicine at Grant Hospital in Chicago. Her younger brother, William, is the mayor of Alta, Utah.

Social Issues Were

an Early Interest

The Levitts grew up in Bensonhurst--the neighborhood from the “The Honeymooners”--and her twisted vowels carry a hint of Ralph Kramden.

Levitt dropped out of high school before her senior year and got a job with a commercial photographer in the Bronx.

“I wanted to be an artist but I couldn’t draw,” she says.

Like others in a budding group of New York photographers at the time, Levitt began her career with an agenda.

“I was interested in social issues, so I thought I should start by taking pictures of working-class people to show the conditions of everything,” she says.

“What changed was that I saw the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and I realized that photographs could stand up by themselves without a purpose. They could be art.”

Inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s Paris street scenes, Levitt set out on the first of her neighborhood trips through Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Armed with the same 35-millimeter Leica model that Cartier-Bresson favored, she roamed the streets and alleys of Spanish Harlem and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She lingered on sidewalks, beside stoops and in empty lots as life unfolded around her. Much of the time, she used a right-angle viewfinder, a gadget that lets the photographer shoot one way while facing another.

The results were at once intimate and unsentimental. Two women exchanging serious words, one with her hand pressed to her chest, while each gazes somewhere over the other one’s shoulder. An old black man cradling a newborn white baby in his massive forearms. Chalk graffiti in careful cursive: “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.”

Her New Yorkers were drunks, flirts, braggarts and wonderers. She sought neither heroes nor villains. She subverted the usual logic of candid photography by capturing moments that were not unbelievable and thoroughly familiar, the distilled expression of things we all recognize to be true.

Levitt’s world, in the words of art critic Ellen Handy, is one of “magically odd juxtapositions.”

“She includes much of the same information that you see in documentary photographs, but her project is much more personal, poetic and eccentric,” says Handy, who curated a Levitt exhibition in 1997 at New York’s International Center of Photography.

“She always says, ‘A good picture is a good picture,’ even when she knows she is dealing with some of the most complex and elaborate and existential qualities of the moment.”

Many of Levitt’s most recognizable photographs are of kids in masks and face paint, absorbed in the theatrics of their own amusement. Bubble-blowing, tree-climbing, skirt-lifting kids, they are the unself-conscious players in a street drama that never seems to end.

“That was before television and air-conditioning,” Levitt says. “People would be outside, and if you just waited long enough, they forgot about you.”

In 1937, Levitt took those pictures to meet Walker Evans, marking the start of a long, mutually influential friendship. Indeed, it was Levitt who, the following year, accompanied Evans--a prep-schooled dandy from Kenilworth, N.J.--into the New York subway, where he would make some his most oft-cited pictures.

The memory of those days sends Levitt rooting through drawers for a prop.

“He would loop it over his neck like this,” she said, using a small point-and-click camera to re-create Evans’ method of shooting undetected in a subway car. “He would rest the camera on his chest, this way, and run a cable through his shirt and out his sleeve. It was pretty damn clever.”

Through Evans, Levitt also met author James Agee, with whom she became a frequent collaborator.

Their sublime 1952 film “In the Street,” shot with Levitt’s friend Janice Loeb, gave life to many of the neighborhood scenes familiar from her still photos, and helped cement Levitt’s reputation as a film editor as well.

These days, Levitt doesn’t go out to shoot in the streets much. She is still getting used to the idea of talking about her previous work. Besides, her passion these days is photographing farm animals as far away from the city as possible.

She knows the subject stands to generate less deep thinking from the art types. And she doesn’t care.

“I care about art, but it is not my main interest anymore. My main interest is animals,” she says, a sly smile broadening. “Why shouldn’t I take photographs of animals? They are beautiful just in themselves.”

Evan Osnos is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.