In The Street: Part 2

If you're in Paris you can see an exhibit of Levitt's photos up until Dec 23rd
From the exhibition description:
The very first photo in the new exhibition of works by Helen Levitt at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson makes you laugh out loud: a heavily pregnant young woman wearing a short dress is shown in profile looking over her shoulder with pure disdain at a girl passing by with two bottles of milk in her hands and bursting with laughter and joy.

Like many of the images in this show, this black-and-white photo was taken in New York City around 1940. Levitt was inspired to become a photographer after seeing a show of the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and this exhibition demonstrates that she had the master’s eye for the telling moment, enriched by her sympathy for ordinary people and a great sense of humor.

The resulting studies in poverty, posture and attitudes need no titles to explain what they are about; everything is in the image. They might make you laugh or cry, but few will leave you indifferent. A group of children walking down the street together looks up in surprise at a covey of soap bubbles floating by. A hand pokes through closed window curtains pointing the way to a mysterious destination. A group of gun-toting kids playing cops and robbers on a stoop are caught in NYPD stances. Kids wearing Scary Movie-type masks climb a sad, leafless tree standing alone in a rubble-filled vacant lot. A teenaged boy poses with all the grace of cat, unaware of the black cat standing behind him. A little boy pulls up the skirt of a bigger girl and stares intently at her underpants.

The second part of the show features color photos in the same vein taken in the 1970s and ’80s. Unlike some photographers who had trouble making the switch from black and white to color, Levitt is able to make the color work for her, as in an image of a beautiful wreck of a red car parked on the street like a blood stain, or of a little girl, limbs akimbo, squatting down to look for something under the rear end of a green American gas-guzzler with a pale-blue Citroën Deux Chevaux in the background. This series also includes more heartbreaking images of poverty in the streets of the city: a broken-down old woman sitting on a step and holding a scruffy, flea-bitten little dog on a leash; a man seen from the back who is bent over almost double and wrapped in plastic, presumably for warmth, while life goes on in the reflective surface of the wall behind him.

Levitt’s images make you feel the grit of New York streets, even while finding the beauty in them. One picture shows two young men posing like caryatids next to the columns framing an imposing doorway, and another a woman in a checkered suit talking to the driver of a Checker cab. The show also includes a few images taken in Mexico during the only journey away from New York she ever took, as devastating in their depiction of poverty and misery as Cartier-Bresson’s (a few of his are also on show).

Two films made by Levitt with James Agee and Janice Loeb, The Quiet One (1949) and In the Street (1952) will be shown regularly during the exhibition.

Levitt, now 94 years old, still lives in New York City, where life goes on.

Heidi Ellison

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson: 2, impasse Lebouis, 75014 Paris. Métro: Gaité. Tel.: 01 56 80 27 00. Open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday & Sunday, 1 p.m.-6:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 1 p.m.-8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.-6:45 p.m. Closed Monday and public holidays. Admission: €6 (free on Wednesday from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.). Through December 23. www.henricartierbresson.org