The Moving Moment
by Jeff Weinstein
APRIL 6, 2009 TAGS:
Many of the world’s best artists can’t explain why their work is any good. Photographer Helen Levitt, who was 95 when she died March 31, 2009 in her sleep at her small Greenwich Village apartment, said many times that if she could articulate why her pictures worked, she wouldn’t need to take them. Photography, she explained, was the only way she knew to “express” herself.
.jpg)
The Brooklyn native never became as popular as contemporaries Walker Evans or Weegee, nor did she claim ownership of gallery walls in the aggressive way her dark art-world double, Diane Arbus, did. Yet Levitt believed that photos could be art. Cartier-Bresson had convinced her that a worthy picture need not convey socially responsible content. A photo should be allowed to stand on its own.
But if we thought that Levitt’s wondrous shots of laughing life on New York’s stoops and sidewalks or before fading handmade signs were a precious collection of “perfect moments,” we’d be dead wrong. “Perfect moments” assumes that the holy artist, with eye and shutter-finger, creates the beauty he captures, that the world roils in a kind of pre-aesthetic chaos until the master photographer stops, frames, and saves it.
No, the universe Levitt samples is bubbling, her generous slices of Spanish Harlem or Mexico City not frozen by her art but moving still. She made much of her living, in fact, as a cinematographer, film editor (one of her employers was Luis Buñuel), and screenwriter -- the screenplay for 1948’s heartbreaking documentary-drama The Quiet One, which she co-wrote, was nominated for an Oscar.
Unlike almost every artist, Levitt hated attention. That reticence, however, gave her camera “invisibility” and allowed her subjects, children and adults, to escape self-consciousness and continue to … play. She faked them out. In an interview for National Public Radio, Levitt admitted that she employed an angling 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. You could turn your camera sideways."
About those sneaky pictures. In her 1930s and ’40s black-and-whites, she made spit-stained sidewalks look like Renaissance grisaille. When she switched to color, she retained her humanistic eye, and avoided echoing advertising by paying attention to animate expression and interaction, not to manufactured objects. Even her chalk-graffiti shots suggest unseen hands behind them.
A mother bends over into her delighted baby’s carriage. Do we concentrate on Mom’s black suit against her son’s bright face? A little girl in white Mary Janes lifts her hands to begin an outdoor pirouette, partnered by a little boy, though each is thinking inner thoughts of dance.
The camera is nowhere, life continues, and the moment extends into a permanent now.
--
Stay Tuned for a video podcast produced in collaboration with Daylight Magazine
Related Story:
Pirkle Jones, 1914-2009
A video podcast produced in collaboration with Daylight Magazine
The Brooklyn native never became as popular as contemporaries Walker Evans or Weegee, nor did she claim ownership of gallery walls in the aggressive way her dark art-world double, Diane Arbus, did. Yet Levitt believed that photos could be art. Cartier-Bresson had convinced her that a worthy picture need not convey socially responsible content. A photo should be allowed to stand on its own. But if we thought that Levitt’s wondrous shots of laughing life on New York’s stoops and sidewalks or before fading handmade signs were a precious collection of “perfect moments,” we’d be dead wrong. “Perfect moments” assumes that the holy artist, with eye and shutter-finger, creates the beauty he captures, that the world roils in a kind of pre-aesthetic chaos until the master photographer stops, frames, and saves it.
No, the universe Levitt samples is bubbling, her generous slices of Spanish Harlem or Mexico City not frozen by her art but moving still. She made much of her living, in fact, as a cinematographer, film editor (one of her employers was Luis Buñuel), and screenwriter -- the screenplay for 1948’s heartbreaking documentary-drama The Quiet One, which she co-wrote, was nominated for an Oscar.
Unlike almost every artist, Levitt hated attention. That reticence, however, gave her camera “invisibility” and allowed her subjects, children and adults, to escape self-consciousness and continue to … play. She faked them out. In an interview for National Public Radio, Levitt admitted that she employed an angling 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. You could turn your camera sideways."
About those sneaky pictures. In her 1930s and ’40s black-and-whites, she made spit-stained sidewalks look like Renaissance grisaille. When she switched to color, she retained her humanistic eye, and avoided echoing advertising by paying attention to animate expression and interaction, not to manufactured objects. Even her chalk-graffiti shots suggest unseen hands behind them.
A mother bends over into her delighted baby’s carriage. Do we concentrate on Mom’s black suit against her son’s bright face? A little girl in white Mary Janes lifts her hands to begin an outdoor pirouette, partnered by a little boy, though each is thinking inner thoughts of dance.
The camera is nowhere, life continues, and the moment extends into a permanent now.
--
Stay Tuned for a video podcast produced in collaboration with Daylight Magazine
Related Story:
Pirkle Jones, 1914-2009A video podcast produced in collaboration with Daylight Magazine
RELATED CONTENT
Latest News Delivered to Your Inbox - Sign up with our site and you will get the latest news about people and subjects that interest you.
