Writings

Helen Levitt began working as an apprentice in a commercial photography studio in the Bronx in 1931. Important encounters with Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1935, and Walker Evans in 1938, were only an element in her growth as an artist, which was also achieved through independent reading, gallery going, and participation in the general swirl of intellectual and artistic activity of New York in the 1930s.

Her eye was always her own. By 1939, one of her photographs was published in Fortune magazine. In 1943, she was the recipient of a solo show at MoMA. She also began working as a filmmaker, directing In the Street (1951), a highly acclaimed documentary film, and working as a cinematographer for The Quiet One (1948), which won the International Award at the 1949 Venice International Film Festival.

Why then, did Helen Levitt, after two decades of making photographs and films that were respected at the very highest levels, direct her attention to color photography?

The turning point came in 1959: in an application to the Guggenheim Foundation, she wrote, “I wish to add to the work I have done in black and white still photography by applying the newest techniques of color photography… Fast lenses and extra-sensitive color film emulsions have just recently reached a point where they are applicable to the kind of work I intend to do.”

When I began photographing in the late 1960s, within the first month, I knew I had to work in color. I believed that color was necessary to render the seasonal and atmospheric effects that had impelled me to photograph in the first place ^{fig. 2}.

I did not make this decision idly: I had carefully photographed several scenes in the landscape in color and then in black-and-white, printed them, and compared the results.

Over the years, I have come to believe that my decision was not necessarily correct: Many photographs made in “black and white” by Robert Adams stir me viscerally ^{fig. 3}. I believe the difference lies in the ability of black and white to render fractional gradations of light. ^[1]

But the decision was made, and then I faced a problem I’ve yet to fully answer for myself: what are the aesthetic principles of the photograph in color, its highest and its most powerful uses?

Important bodies of work have come along in photography at times of great disruption in society. In moments of large-scale social transformation, an artist has arisen to record that which they held precious, that which would be no more. Photography’s essential ability—to catch time, to hold it in its place—is used to do exactly that.

Think of Atget going forth, lumbering with his heavy equipment on an early Sunday morning to record the small corners of “old Paris” that remained despite Haussmann’s campaign to build the militarily efficient wide boulevards of modern Paris.

Or consider Sander, who singlehandedly rebuilt German society with his archive of essential types following the ravages of the Great War.

With architectural and social perspicuity, Walker Evans recorded the eastern tier of the United States as the Great Depression brought its hardships. For William Eggleston, the impulse seems to have been to record the shards of an older attitude toward life in the South, just as the interstates, restaurant and motel chains spread across the region.

In 1840 J. M. W. Turner, the painter seemingly born to make atmospheric landscapes and seascapes of the blowsy weather of the British Isles, was entering what would be the final decade of his life. After forty years of exhibiting his work at the Royal Academy of Arts, his vision began to soar — to take on a whole new freedom and wildness.

A new cloud of controversy about his work and his life arose around him like one of the swirling passages in his paintings.

“He paints now as if his brains and imagination were mixed up on his palette with soapsuds and lather,” wrote the critic William Beckford. Accused of painting with, “cream or chocolate or yolk of egg or current jelly… His whole array of kitchen stuff,” Turner was in need of some aesthetic justification.

Enter John Ruskin, a wealthy young aesthete who had recently studied at Oxford. In time he would become one of the great and controversial voices of the 19th Century, not only as a critic of art but also as a radical social theorist — an advocate for working men and for utopian communities. However, for the moment he was living under the thumb of his ambitious wine merchant father and his controlling mother (who had taken rooms at Oxford to better supervise him). Ruskin was forty years younger than Turner when they met at a garden party.

Walking across deep plowed fields of the Roman countryside, on a day in August, I am like a small ship facing directly into oncoming waves: there is a difference in height of at least a meter between the trough and the crest of the furrow. Clumps of hard brown earth make the going choppy. And it is hot—it is slightly before noon but in an hour no one, but no one, will be seen outside.

I am sailing a straight course for Cinecitta Due, the glass and chrome shop- ping mall with air conditioning and, more importantly for my purposes, Due Palme Gelateria where a triple portion of some of the best gelato in Rome awaits.

As I cross the waves I might spy a bit of Roman pottery or a Roman coin (the Via Tuscolana went right through this field) but I am not thinking about antiquity; I am trying to decide today’s flavors. And why not? The Emperor Nero, we are told, had blocks of ice brought to Rome from nearby mountains (by runners no less) which were then shaved and used to make a kind of fruit sorbet. Regardless of its truth the tale makes sense on a day this hot.

Going to the mall after spending the morning in solitary communion with the ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct (and the Anio Novus Aqueduct piggy- backed on top of it) amidst tall, yellow grass and green umbrella pines is not necessarily inconsistent: I got here by subway, the Giulio Agricola stop on the A line. And I am walking in the field where Fellini filmed a statue of Christ being airlifted by helicopter over the Claudian Aqueduct for the open- ing sequence of La Dolce Vita. Aside from a reference to the Second Coming (to decadent post-war Rome), did Fellini simply want to remind us that in Italy the past is always very much present?

Robert Frank and I must have made an interesting sight that warm July afternoon on Düstere Strasse. We resemble each other, but he is older than I, so no matter what we were up to, we could have made sense as father/son.

And in one important sense we were: when I was becoming a photographer in the late 1960s, his book, The Americans, was already a landmark—that’s much too weak a word, but what other word for a body of work that changed the course of the river of Photography in a way that it could never take the old course again.

I would look at it before I went to sleep, and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again. The country was so bleak in those sooty pages, each one an artifact ripped from the landscape and brought straight to the bindery. Frank had found a way to set the tone for the formless lives that went unfilmed in America.

Two years before I encountered his book, I had taken my first cross-country trip—three of us in an immense gold driveway car that needed to be delivered to its owner in Los Angeles. We sailed from the East Coast to the West in less than three days—one of us sleeping across the back seat, one up front trying to stay awake with the driver.

Stephen Shore's photograph of a summer morning settling in on Holden Street in North Adams, Massachusetts, appears to be a picture replete with dualities, the most obvious being that of town and countryside. The brick commercial buildings bookend a central panel of green hills and blue sky as if the entirety were an early Christian altarpiece. The most sacred panel, the centre one, contains an image of a deity, which in this secular case turns out to be a wooden building of pure white. The building stands in front of a mountain, a standard symbol of spiritual elevation.

In America, the deeply archetypal notion of the town (the Old Norse 'tun'), has been particularly resonant: 'Small Town America', 'Our Town' and 'Main Street' are all coded signifiers of Americanized virtue. However, at other times 'town' can signify a kind of gossipy Peyton Place where individual freedom may be nullified by group mores and neighborhood nosiness. Writing of Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway described it as a place of 'wide lawns and narrow minds'. Several years after Shore made his sunlit picture, another artist, Gregory Crewdson, was repeatedly casting North Adams as a noir municipality where a darker reality waits in the bushes just beyond the white picket fence.

Regardless of which view of town is taken, when the town/country duality is made, town is portrayed as the dark urban merchant, evil in comparison to the bright virtues of Nature and rural living. Nothing trumps Nature - it is pure, it is good. Its mythic credentials run deeper than those of any old 'tun'.

Because Wilderness has not been touched by the hand of man, it provides a clean slate for the projection of idealized human attributes - or at least it did until the English critic John Ruskin came along in 1856 and referred to the personification of Nature as the 'Pathetic Fallacy’.

In the 1840s in New England, a “lost generation” of youths refused to follow their fathers down to the banks and cotton merchant houses of Boston. They grew their hair long, read Schiller and other German Romantics and went to the woods to play their flutes. They took vows of poverty and retreated to garrets to write poetry. Occasionally one of them would go to the wharves in Boston hoping to catch a ship to India to learn Sanskrit.

I first read of these North Country bohemians in Van Wyck Brook’s The Flowering of New England, an intellectual and literary history of the “ancien” region of the United States, to use Calvin Trillin's description. The parallels between the transcendental past and my 1960s present are striking.

Years later, while traveling and making the pictures that would become American Prospects, I went to Aroostook County, Maine, to photograph the potato harvest. In the back of my mind, I was hoping to pay a visit to Helen and Scott Nearing, whose book Living the Good Life was a bible to the 1960s back-to-the-land movement. After years of homesteading in Vermont, they now lived on the rocky coast of Maine. Scott was ninety-nine years old and out back chopping wood when I went up and knocked on the door. His handshake was firm. I showed him the pictures I had made and he didn't like them– he found them too critical. “Picture an ideal world and photograph that,” were his exact words.

Eleven years later I begin to take his advice. I was traveling and photographing for On This Site, a study of violence in America. At first I thought I would balance those dystopic pictures with photographs of truly utopian places. But while balance may work in dividing a chocolate bar between two children, it doesn't necessarily do so in art. I decided to keep On This Site a book about violence. Nevertheless I continued to make pictures of ideal communities. The process provided relief from documenting places stained by what had occurred there.

I have rarely encountered a student who went about learning with such intensity and such integrity. Every Saturday for four years Alec would go to New York and visit every art exhibition of interest. It was like a military campaign.

For about a year and a half Alec struggled, trying all sorts of things - each was a failure, some pretty interesting, some pretty awful. He was working with such integrity - he didn't want to copy what other people had done, he didn't want to go over the same territory. And then in the middle of his last year at college he got mad at me, mad at himself, mad with photography - and suddenly everything fell into place and he began to produce absolutely first-rate work.

There's an old saying amongst art teachers - 'when the great student comes along you merely hold their coat' - and that's what I did for Alec.

Alec has done something that has changed the course of the medium that will be followed.

A cemetery in Fair Oaks, California, a Sierra foothills suburb of Sacramento. Although it's a cool, gray, mid-January morning, the magpies are so active that one is forced to think of spring. I've come to visit the grave of Cari Lightner, a young girl who was run over by a drunk driver in 1980. Being here has particular meaning for me; my brother Gabriel was killed in an automobile accident. In my mind, I have associated her death with his.

As I wander, I see other graves. “Beloved and Loving, Married 74 years.” He died at 100; she at 102. One man has a picture of his Harley engraved on his tombstone. Another reads: “Cha Cha Grandma.” What does that mean? Was “Cha Cha” a family way of saying good-bye? Is what we are at the end ultimately what we are?

In front of me, a green copper marker from the 1930s reads “OUR BOY.” I remember my father crying “my boy, my boy” for my older brother Andrew who died of leukemia when he was eleven and I was ten. Across the way is a black tombstone; an etched portrait shows a young man of twenty, the inscription tells me: “Patrick bravely battled leukemia for two years.”

In grief, we compose these terse life summaries and elegiac messages… but for whom? What other words are so intimate and so public? Carved in stone to withstand wind and time, they speak to immortality; they console those who wish for consolation; they give pause to a stranger.