Helen Levitt: A Poker Player in the Art World

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.”

But can it be that a few f-stops (clicks of shutter speed or aperture) were reason enough to leave her comfortable home in monochromatic photography and her distinguished associates, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans—and set off on the wine-dark sea of potentially lurid color?

This was a risky idea. First of all, there were few photographic antecedents she might look to. Books were a rarity—in his lifetime, Walker Evans published only one monograph—and that was, in black and white. (Evans once reportedly said, “Black and white are the colors of photography,” though in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he did experiment with color.)

Some magazines, particularly the U.S. Camera Annual, occasionally featured color photography, but in issues from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, color mostly appeared in fashion work by Steichen, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Paul Outerbridge. Here and there, a color image by Ansel Adams or Edward Weston might appear, but nothing that offered any guidance in organizing the riot of color going on every day on the streets of New York.

Nor were there any galleries showing work in color. A quarter of a century later, after the Eggleston show at MoMA, that would change, but in 1959, there were none.

Given these difficulties, why indeed, did she make the change?

None of her many friends can offer a precise reason for her transition to color. Elaine Mayes, who was particularly close (and who made the movie, Summers with Helen), offered, “Color was real, and Helen was real.” Perhaps that was it—but at the time, black and white was also considered “real” perhaps even more so. Carleton Willers, Helen Levitt’s gallerist at the time once inquired of me, “Why are you working in color? Black and white is so natural.” I knew what he meant.

So one reaches for a speculative answer, Levitt always fought boredom. She was a great reader and a serious student of contemporary art film. In the daytime her television was on—a color TV tuned to black and white. Her longtime gallerist, Laurence Miller, reports that when he visited on Monday afternoons, they would play gin rummy for pennies. At the end of the afternoon, he might owe 36 cents. On various nights, she often played poker.

Was that it? Was she a poker player in the art world? If so, how did she play her color hand?

Her first decision in approaching the aesthetics of this new medium, as it would be for anyone attempting color in those days, was whether to simply ignore color and work as always—or to seek out color in a directed way and make special use of it.

Years later, Levitt would claim to have not considered color. John Lehr, a photographer and professor, tells the story of Phillip Pisciotta, a fellow graduate student at Yale who obtained Levitt’s phone number through a late-night visit to the faculty office.

Obsessed with color photography and its possibilities, he immediately called her:

When Helen Levitt picked up, he said, “Hi, my name is Phillip Pisciotta. I’m a graduate student at Yale, and I’ve just been thinking so much about color photography. I’ve also been looking at your work and I want to ask you—did you think differently when you were working in black and white versus when you worked in color?”

There was a pause.

Then she said, “I didn’t think about it at all.”

And then she asked, “Do you have any more questions?”

He said, “No”

And then she hung up the phone.

Goethe’s concept of “seeing without thinking” comes to mind—a methodology of observing without judgement. (So does Laurence Miller’s comment: “She was as delicious a person as ever there was.”)

Others have concurred with the idea that her work was essentially unchanged by the addition of color. Writing in, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980, the curator and art historian Kevin Moore wrote, “Helen Levitt tactfully inserted color into her own well-established black and white oeuvre of street photography.”

I disagree. I have come to believe that the element of color necessitated a substantially new order in her work: there were decisions to be made about formal means that would affect the chromatic aesthetics of her pictures.

First, Levitt had to decide whether to work in negative or slide (positive) film. Negative film offered the advantage of wide exposure latitude, as opposed to slide film which needed to be underexposed by half a stop, which is a difficult feat in the fluid environment of New York’s streets.

On the other hand, negative film was, and still is, relatively unsharp compared to slide film, particularly Kodachrome 25.

In making prints from transparencies one had to turn to the dye transfer method. This process yielded rich permanent color, but it was prohibitively expensive—accessible mainly to advertising agencies rather than artists living in 5th floor walk-ups in Greenwich Village. (Helen Levitt was once so hard pressed for cash that she wrote to Cartier-Bresson to ask if she might sell a print he had gifted to her. Gentleman that he was, he assented, and sent her a replacement print.)

So, which one did she choose? The slide film, of course, with the possibility of exacting but seemingly unaffordable prints, a poker player’s bluff.

Having made that decision, she had another one to make. Kodachrome had “the nice bright colors…makes all the world a sunny day.” Ektachrome, another transparency film, was slightly less sharp, had lower contrast, was less saturated, and had a subtle blue-bias. It could be considered a more truthful representation of the world, lacking the exaggerations of Kodachrome. Given her uncompromising honesty, Ektachrome was the natural choice for Helen Levitt.

The next decision had to do with light itself. Levitt favored the shady side of the street. This enabled a more even palette, allowing subject matter to exist in an undifferentiated surround, none of the bleaching out that occurs when portions of slide film are overexposed.

I know that this was her preferred strategy because I had the privilege of photographing with Levitt in the South Bronx and elsewhere during the 1970s.

Here’s how it went: first of all, I didn’t really “go photographing” with her. I was there to provide security—which was utterly farcical, because if anyone needed security, it was I. She was so attuned to the streets, so graceful in her gestures that she became invisible—instantly a part of the block, as if she had always been there. Her wardrobe, chosen with frugality as a criterion, made her a fit in any neighborhood.

Her ability to fuse with the street gave her the extra time needed to compose her frame as color, which is far more demanding than composing in black and white.

I always kept my distance, staying across the street and slightly behind her as she performed a kind of Butoh-like dance on the shady side. I never got out my camera, fearing that my presence might be noticed and prevent her work. (When at last I saw her go into a bodega, purchase a can of cat food, open it, and place it in an empty lot, I knew that the shoot was over.)

But what about the pictures that issued from these expeditions? Why did she go out to dangerous neighborhoods with an untried medium in her camera? Remember that New York City in the ‘70s was a city in crisis. Crack was assaulting the social fabric of the very neighborhoods Levitt worked in. There were empty lots in which to place cat food because the South Bronx was burning down. Black and white photography is particularly adept at depicting grim realities, which makes her choice to work in color even more surprising.

But, looking at Levitt’s work from the ‘70s and ‘80s, we don’t see the harshest realities of the neighborhood, we don’t see pathos. We see daily life being led daily; people sitting on the stoop like library lions gossiping and simply letting time pass slowly on long soft summer afternoons. The true owners of the street, children play with each other with inventiveness. There are no polemics here, just grace itself.

In the same way that Evans and Agee depicted sharecropper families of Sprott, Alabama with their heads held high, their threadbare cabins decorated with leftover commercial displays which might also be seen as sign of their inventiveness, Levitt’s people possess cleverness, dignity, a simple humanity that is, in the finest sense of the word, beautiful. It is in their mutual presentations of the lives of ordinary people as possessed of a finer nature that the work of Evans and Levitt is joined. It is difficult to picture this beauty rendered as fulsomely in black and white because of a level of removal that adheres to black and white photography.

For one thing, a built in “pastness” is inherent to black and white photography—we have difficulty perceiving the past as having existed in full color. Perhaps this is because we have been conditioned by all of the faded color photographs that we have encountered.

So Levitt needed color to make her pictures present and ongoing. She also needed to make herself present and ongoing. It grieved her to no end when curators chose darkish vintage prints. She felt it made her seem like a dead artist.

But there is a great problem in working in color—one that all who would traffic with color, whether in photography or any other medium, must resolve. Art, to be Art, needs to be transcendent—above the ordinary. And color photography is too akin to ordinary sight.

There must be an intervention by the would-be artist—an intervention that places the color in a pattern that alters our everyday codes of perception, something that signals that we are witnessing an exalted moment. Usually, this is achieved through some system of abstraction. Despite her protestation to the contrary, Levitt did have to think about color.

It is difficult to describe what in particular she did because the most fundamental tenet of all of Levitt’s photography, whether monochromatic or polychromatic, is her invisibility within the photograph; she achieved as perhaps no other photographer ever did. There was no signature style, no fancy framing to call attention to the operator of the camera: the highest state of Art is artlessness.

To achieve this abstraction, her pictures are built as on a canvas. She relies on two types of canvases: the brownstone browns and dirty bricks, and later, the garish hues the car industry in Detroit supplied to the streets. These surfaces are her ground, her Greek chorus, in front of which the protagonist(s) enact their fragment of drama. Oftentimes, a frame within a frame—a doorway or window—contains the primary actor.

Additionally she relies on color, particularly what is sometimes termed—“color as accent,” to bring our attention to the nominal subject.

Besides this, I believe that there is an all-over patterning within her pictures as well. Quite often, her pictures are built out of two or three pastel hues—importantly, hues of equal density. The exception to this is her usage of cars as a backdrop, where the more garish the color, the better.

When I began to notice this phenomenon in her work, it made me think of the work of Paul Klee, the Swiss-German painter and Bauhaus teacher. Klee was at the Bauhaus but chose to stay in his native Switzerland during and after WWII.

By no means do I mean to suggest that Levitt was influenced by Klee, although Klee did have a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941 and many subsequent gallery shows in New York. Levitt and Klee were both artists of the first magnitude whose reputations may have been constrained by reference to the world of children within their work. This may have, in some quarters, signaled less seriousness or high purpose.

I include a few Levitt/Klee comparisons only to illustrate the notion that she did think about color, that she did control every bit of it within the frame, and that her pictures are seen as overall compositions in color.

However, the work of Helen Levitt needs no reference to that of Paul Klee or that of anyone else: her work is a singular achievement in its depiction of humanness—and its uses of the unexplored language of color within photography.

While reading Maria Morris Hambourg’s thoughtful and eloquent essay on Helen Levitt in the SFMoMA book, Helen Levitt, I found myself coming to an abrupt halt when I read that: “she has never presumed to challenge authority, overturn tradition, define the next wave.” To my eyes, it seems as if the color work that Levitt produced in the ‘70s was indeed the “next wave,” as much as that of Eggleston or anyone else. Her work took the jumble of color and life that flourished in the neighborhoods of New York and made it a lyric, coherent whole. It is not as racy as the work of others, but it is no less of an advance. If the reputation of Helen Levitt is ever to find its true level, this achievement must be recognized.

Contrary to John Szarkowski’s assertion in William Eggleston’s Guide that Eggleston was the first to see both, “the blue and the sky.” Helen Levitt, some 15 or 20 years earlier, found a way to create a system of color that was at once transporting and transparent, allowing seamless access to her enduring content. Szarkowski, at the time of her 1964 slideshow, had worried that the color photographer would have to come to accept the fact that the lavender tie might garner more attention than the face above it.

With the benefit of her work from the 1970s and 1980s now assembled, it is apparent that John Szarkowski needn’t have worried.