In The Street: Part 1

from a 1997 review of a Helen Levitt Retrospective
Finding Drama on the Streets
By SARAH BOXER

''Amazing,'' one woman said to another in the dark screening room. ''That's why I love Helen Levitt,'' the other one said.

They were watching a child slowly licking a window pane, a vignette from ''In the Street,'' a short documentary movie that Ms. Levitt made in 1952 with Janice Loeb and James Agee. When the child is finished licking, she presses her whole solemn face against the window. Her nostrils briefly steam up two tiny spots on the glass. Then the offhand, rhythmic, animal-like comedy is over. The camera goes off in search of other dramas: street fights with flour-bombs, children dressed up and dancing like grown-ups, old women endlessly sweeping up the streets of New York.

Ms. Levitt, who began photographing New York street life in the 1930's under the influence of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, has just won the 1997 Master of Photography Award given by the International Center of Photography. In honor of that event, there are two exhibitions of her work now in New York City: one at the Laurence Miller Gallery in SoHo of her black-and-white pictures from 1937 to 1945, including her pictures of children's graffiti, and another at the International Center of Photography Midtown sampling her life's work, including the movie ''In the Street.''

Between the two shows, a lot of Ms. Levitt's graceful and untamed images from the 1930's and 40's are on view: three children posed languidly in Halloween masks and costumes on a New York stoop; a pregnant girl tossing a disdainful look over her shoulder as a young girl swishes in front of her clutching two milk bottles to her breast; a toddler in a pram, squealing with rapture as his mother plunges her head into his carriage; three schoolgirls earnestly talking, while a younger boy lifts the dress of one of them to give himself (and the viewer) a studious peek at her dusty undies. Every one of these pictures is a piece of spontaneous theater.

If there is a key to Ms. Levitt's multiple gifts -- for comedy, lyric gesture, classical pose and unstudied pathos -- it is her ability to get inside an event and find the pitch of its drama without altering it by her own presence.

In one photo at the center, four girls saunter uphill along the sidewalk. They appear to be tied, as if by slender strings, to five soap bubbles floating along the street against the black wall of the underpass on Park Avenue. There is nothing earthshaking happening, but the picture implies a plot. The girls have blown the bubbles and are following them up the street until they pop. The plot of the photograph is the plot for their play. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is also the case with some of Ms. Levitt's color pictures at the center. In one taken in 1972, a child squats on a windowsill with her arms reaching out. She almost looks ready to jump into the arms of a man below. The viewer's eyes are naturally drawn to the man, who is hardly in a position to catch her. In one hand he holds part of a cardboard box he may have fished out of the trash. In the other, a cigarette. He looks a little scruffy. Despite the hint of recklessness, there is a feeling of cheer, even comedy. The child, who feels she'll be caught, and the man, who feels he may well catch her, are embraced in a single uncertain plot.

Many of Ms. Levitt's street narratives have this tragicomic air. At the Laurence Miller Gallery, a sequence of pictures taken on a single day in 1939 make up a kind of photographic comic strip with the feel of a silent movie. In the first frame of the sequence, a drunken man has fallen into a tipped-up stroller on the sidewalk, creating a seat for himself at the center of a street drama. A man and woman sitting on a stoop look at him impassively. By and by, a man walks up to offer the stroller man a light, then gives the photographer a dirty look. In the next frame, another man comes into the picture and tries to tip the stroller upright. Then a woman comes by. Stroller man grabs her wrist. She bends down and shows him her knee, then looks at the camera with a gimlet eye. In the last frame, stroller man looks directly at the photographer, smiling sheepishly. He has scored a rare combination: a cigarette and some solitude.

It's not exactly a happy scene. But within the bounds of a drunken life on the street, Ms. Levitt found, much the way Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton might have, the moment of plenitude, when comedy is tangled in tragedy. In that last frame, when the drunk looks at the camera, he simultaneously acknowledges his condition and his comic appeal. He has, in effect, taken his bow.

Once the photographer is acknowledged, the game is over. One picture conveys the full force of her carefully engineered absence. Two boys hold up the frame of a large dressing mirror. But where the reflective glass -- and Ms. Levitt's own reflection -- ought to be, instead there is a boy sitting on a tricycle and looking down and out through the empty frame at some boys examining shards in the gutter. Behind them, men and women chat, children play. There are 18 people in all in the uncropped version. And incredibly, not a single one of them is looking at the photographer.

How is this possible? One of the devices Ms. Levitt used (according to Maria Morris Hambourg, writing in the retrospective catalogue from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) was the right-angle viewfinder. When she pointed her camera in one direction, its lens was aimed 90 degrees away.

It is good to keep this in mind. At the photography center show, for example, there is an extraordinary portrait of four aligned profiles on a stoop, three facing right and one left, all disapproving in their own way. Although the portrait is intimate, not one of the subjects is looking at Ms. Levitt. That may be because she did not appear to be looking at them. With her right-angle viewfinder, she would in fact have been pointing her camera in the direction that three of the people were looking.

But, of course, she is looking at them. And sometimes they see her. That seems to be how she knows when, and only when, it's time to move on. In the movie ''In the Street,'' there is a sequence in which the camera is held on the subjects until it encounters the inevitable flinch, nervous laugh, or uncomfortable sideways glance that indicates the subjects have become self-conscious. At the very end of the movie, Ms. Levitt finally meets her match. A boy stares straight at her, without moving, without blinking his large liquid eyes. In the face-off, all comedy drains away. Ms. Levitt stays on him for an uncomfortably long time. Then she looks away.