New York City’s doorways, storefronts and cascading fire escapes were the grand backdrop to Helen Levitt’s photos. In the Lower East Side and Harlem, children pretended to be bride and groom, wore masks for Halloween or drew with chalk on the sidewalk. The lyricism of her work led her to be called the city’s visual poet laureate, supposedly an apolitical, black-and-white photographer of the everyday.
Helen Levitt was an extremely private person and preferred to let her photographs speak for her – and if you listen very carefully, you might just hear the Bensonhurst accent…
Helen Levitt was an extremely private person and preferred to let her photographs speak for her – and if you listen very carefully, you might just hear the Bensonhurst accent coming through. “Dawling,” a photograph might intone with intimate familiarity, suggesting we come closer to get the gossip or a bite to eat. “Fuhgeddaboudit,” another might insist, making it clear the window for opportunity is firmly shut.
From the earliest hand-tinted postcards to kinetic, digital images, the sidewalks of New York have been muse and model to countless color photographers.
“New York in Color” is just that – a hefty tome spanning a century of Gotham in photographs, from hand-tinted postcards to tack-sharp and super-saturated digital shots. Many of the names are familiar — Danny Lyon, Burt Glinn, Helen Levitt and Joel Meyerowitz. But the thrill for Bob Shamis, the photographer, historian and curator who is the book’s author, was rooting dozens of images that had not been seen before.
And she talked some about walking around the streets of New York and how she could capture those moments unnoticed.
“I had attached to my camera — I had a little device that fit on the Leica camera that they called a winkelsucher, which meant that you could look one way and take the picture the other,” she said. “You could turn your camera sideways.”
Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.
The critic Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker in 2001, described Ms. Levitt as ”the supreme poet-photographer of the streets and people of New York.”
