Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know…— Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends
“You have to do your legwork” was Helen Levitt’s advice to anyone looking to spend their days taking photographs in the streets. A lucky shot doesn’t happen by chance.
In the 1930s, Helen Levitt (1913–2009) was with her camera walking New York City, her hometown. Children caught her eye. Her pictures are full of gusto and movement. You don’t need to try to explain what she saw and captured on camera because anyone who was ever child gets it in an instant. The children in Levitt’s pictures are living in the moment. There is no before and after. This is all.
But these children playing on the city’s streets the late 1930s and early 1940s, often left something behind: chalk drawings in the sidewalk and on the walls.
Starting in 1934, Helen Levitt, along with other women such as Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Tina Modotti, began to noticed in the male-dominated world of photography.
In the mid-1930s, Levitt met the photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, and she helped Evans make prints for his 1938 exhibition, American Photographs. She showed him her black-and-white photographs of children making graffiti-like al fresco chalk drawings and playing, and he described her style of her work as anti-journalistic.
In 1943, she was one of the pioneers to obtain a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which allowed her to devote herself professionally to her work.
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“All over the city on the streets and walks and walls the children have established ancient, essential and ephemeral forms of art,… have set forth in chalk and crayon the names and images of their pride, love, preying, scorn, desire. And drawings, all over, of ships, homes, western heroes, and monsters which each strong effaces.”
– James Agee, 1939
Via: NYPL, Village Preservation, Fraenkel Gallery, Street Lab, In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-1948
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