One of the clever conjuring tricks that a work of art can perform is to transform the visible world into the work of the artist. Read a Balzac novel and everyone around suddenly seems to be feverishly social climbing, or contesting a will. Watch a Fellini movie and the neighbors swell up, larger than life, freakish and endearing. Study a van Eyck painting and the people outside the museum organize themselves into saints and sentries, madonnas and magdalenes, auditioning for bit parts as extras in the crowd at a Netherlandish Nativity.
Look at a Helen Levitt photo and the city streets, the subways and rooftops, become pure Helen Levitt. Encountering Helen Levitt’s pictures, taken mostly between 1930 and 2000, mostly around Manhattan, is like taking off your sunglasses, or cleaning your spectacles, or just blinking—which is only appropriate, since so many of them seem to have been taken in a blink—and to picture something that will be gone, that was gone, a blink after it was taken. These photographs radically readjust our visual fine-tuning to remind us of how rapidly everything changes, of how large a fraction of what we see won’t exist, in its present form, only a heartbeat from now. It’s impossible not to notice that the beautiful gypsy kid, caught in mid-motion in the doorway of his apartment, was disappearing even as his portrait was being taken.
What makes these pictures so unusual is their instinctive, unstagy, natural grasp of what adds layers of meaning and beauty to a visual image. All decisions about subject and composition have been made unconsciously, on the fly, in a few seconds or less, since these pictures’ subjects, like the photographer, were lively and on the move, people and animals, adults and children, not still lifes of driftwood, flowers, and fruit—though there is the occasional wall decorated with chalk drawings that are also transitory, finite, a life span that can last only until the next rain, the downpour that will inevitably erase the public announcement that bill jones mother is a hore.
Helen Levitt’s eye, her visual judgment, is like a great draftsman’s line, and one can only admire the acuity of vision that allowed her to catch the moment when so many different, disparate events were happening at once, and playing out against such ironically suitable backgrounds; one can only marvel at the focus that enabled her to see the ways families arrange themselves in solid pillars of flesh, spanning generations; the quickness that alerted her to a woman in a checkered outfit standing beside a checkered cab; the sureness that let Levitt capture a sandlot baseball player at the most guided moment of his swing, an act that happens to be taking place in front of a wall mural, painted on brick, of a guy playing ball.
The photographs in Crosstown seem so effortlessly right that it’s only when you think for two seconds, or recall all the bad documentary photography you’ve seen, or pause to marvel at the high-wire act they’re performing even as they focus steadfastly on the ground, that you realize how frighteningly simple it would be to get all of this terribly wrong, to make the children cute and the old ladies darling. Helen Levitt’s work is never sentimental; it never aestheticizes or objectifies, never turns its subjects into art objects, never distorts them into noble heroes of poverty and desolation; it is never falsely, preemptively elegiac or nostalgic. You never feel the artist calling attention to herself or to the breadth and compassion of her vision. Everything is happening too quickly—and too interestingly—for anything remotely resembling self-conscious artiness or narcissism.
Here, as always, humor helps, waging its sly guerrilla war against the pious and sentimental. Many of these photos are hilarious, but the (never easy or obvious) jokes are subtle, and difficult to summarize or re-create apart from the image; it is impossible, for example, to explain why the nuns looking out at the river against the skyline make us feel so lighthearted and giddy. The cardboard box with legs and the mother disappearing into her small son’s stroller (and in the process transforming the stroller into a vehicle equipped with both wheels and human torso) suggest that surrealism should have been a term invented for certain especially felicitous examples of naturalistic street photography. The little kid in the window with the painted face, mustache and beard, and Frankenstein scar makes us laugh out loud, but laughter is only the image’s way of getting our attention—attention that stays on the photo, as it does on all of Helen Levitt’s pictures, as we try to see and process everything in the frame (the curtain, the woman, the contrast between the baby’s perfect comfort and ease and the essential precariousness of a baby in the window) and to imagine all the other moments that came before and surrounded the moments in which the picture was taken.
How much complex information these seemingly straightforward images convey, with their mysterious intimations of nuanced Chekhovian situations: the drama of the overweight girl, mooning, helplessly infatuated with her heartbreakingly handsome young neighbor, of the woman with the flashlight calling out for help, of the game of hide-and-seek. And the image of the woman and her children stuffed into a phone booth says more—in shorthand, more entertainingly and affectionately—about the coziness and claustrophobia of family life than many novels or plays do.
After looking at Helen Levitt’s photographs, the street and the city seem, to put it simply, more interesting. For what has come through the pictures is not the artist’s personality, but rather the quality and quick intensity of her interest, her instant comprehension of her subject. In some inexplicable way, you feel that she instinctively grasps—she gets—the life transpiring around her. Among the qualities that distinguish Helen Levitt’s photographs from anyone else’s is the particularity of her lively, bemused, cool admiration for the life of the neighborhoods she depicts—never idealized fantasy or false appreciation, but rather a genuine pleasure in tiny details of self-presentation (a swagger, a detail of makeup or coiffure), of costume (a funny hat, a headscarf, a stylish fedora), a gesture. How could we have imagined, before we saw these photos, the nuances and range of what can be communicated by a comforting hand placed on a neighbor’s shoulder, or by the balletic grace of an old man sitting sideways in his chair and describing something to a friend, his hands as expansive and expressive as those of an orchestra conductor. Levitt’s eye is drawn to subjects who are self-dramatizing, who play to the crowd, even when no one is looking—like the guy declaiming from his seat on the front bumper of a truck.
What keeps snagging her attention is a sort of paradoxically unself-conscious theatricality: the drama of the little girl in her church clothes grabbing the old man around the waist, the mysterious contretemps between the reverend or priest and the girls in the doorway, the scenario that the young woman with the milk bottles is enacting for the entertainment and torture of her contemptuous pregnant friend, the cinematic series of events involving a guy, a baby carriage, his neighbors, and a cigarette. Her subjects are theatrical even when they’re asleep: the man napping on the hood of the car beside his bunches of unsold bananas. And, not to be outdone, the animals—a horse, a Dalmatian, a black cat, a mini-flock of chickens—seem likewise gifted with a particular flair for the pictorial and the dramatic. The pigeons (not what we usually think of as the most intelligent of creatures) seem here to know something important, which they have wisely elected not to tell us.
These photographs are action-packed; there are no static tableaux. Even when taken on the subway, a place where one might think the opportunities for movement (except, of course, the train’s rocking and forward motion) are limited, the pictures capture charged, intensely animated, and highly mobile transactions. Men and women embrace, regard each other, wary or entranced; parents hold their children; each glance or touch conveys a lifetime’s worth of experience. Often, the connections among these subway passengers are so profound that they seem to function on a biological or cellular level, and the pictures offer hilarious, insightful glosses on the way that family members start off—or wind up—physically resembling one another.
What goes without saying is how much of the city pictured here—the buildings, the street life, the neighborhoods, the physical types—no longer exists. Helen Levitt’s city is (unlike the cities that other photographers have given us) neither a futurist construct nor a dreamy, romantic American version of Atget’s Paris, nor an abstract wonderland of geometric form, but instead—and always—a theater and a playground. Even the broken record is having fun (and entertaining its nonexistent audience, or, rather, the audience of one) as it rolls across the street. Helen Levitt has become known as a photographer of children, but what appears to attract her is not so much children as action in general, and play in particular. Dressed up in their Halloween masks and costumes, cross-dressing as women or as some fantasy version of a foreign legionnaire (a fashion model that no contemporary kid would dream of imitating), dancing, pirouetting, fondling or brandishing toy guns, children are simply more likely than adults to be acting and playing.
Like the photo of the baby with the painted face in the window, many of these pictures evoke the innate, unconscious fearlessness—the natural courage—of kids who haven’t learned any better than to trust the world, children who have confidence in their own bodies, their own grace and strength, and who know beyond a doubt that they will live forever. They scramble up trees and across the lintels of doorways (or, when they are older, flank the doorway, like handsome caryatids), they catch rides in the backs of trucks, they drive their bikes through a frame from which the mirror has been removed, and in the process they shatter everything we think we know about conventional ideas of child safety—and conventional notions of photography. In their nerviness, their assurance, and the risks they take, the children resemble the photographer who is taking their picture, and who is engaged (like them) in a parallel, split-second defiance of the seemingly unbreakable laws of gravity, and of time.
Also in defiance (in this case, of the ways in which our culture devalues, undervalues, and commodifies sex), the photographs in Crosstown are extraordinarily sexy. It’s not just the obvious candidates—the lovers on the subway, the sharply dressed couple in front of the luggage store, the gorgeous young woman in her mother’s lap, the young man leaning, flamingo-like, against a parking meter—who strike us that way, but also the old and the young, the men and women well outside the range of what we’re encouraged to think of as charismatic and attractive. What’s more, it’s the photographer’s interest in them—in their unself-conscious grace and self-confidence, in the way they inhabit their bodies, in their faces, their eyes, their skin, their irreducibly complex selves—that makes them seem vital, interesting, beautiful, worthy of the second—and third—look. There’s even something paradoxically sexy about the solitude of many of these photographic subjects, about the quiet insistence with which they have managed to create a tranquil private space for themselves amid the swirl and bustle of the street.
In picture after picture, Helen Levitt’s photographs compel us to pay a closer, a more bemused and studious attention to the city, to the world, and to our fellow humans, which is, finally, among the most important things that any sort of naturalistic art can do. They make us aware of how much can happen in an instant, they console us for the loss of what is constantly disappearing, and they remind us of what is, just as constantly, arriving to take its place. Each one of these lively, spirited, and immensely beautiful images represents a feisty, spirited, irrepressible victory over (and a celebration of) the inexorable forces of change and the passage of time.