In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-1948

by Helen Levitt

“All over the city on 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. . . . The Lady in this House is Nuts. . . . Lois I have gone up the street. Don’t forget to bring your skates. . . . Ruby loves Max but Max hates Ruby. . . . And drawings, all over, of . . . ships, homes . . . western heroes . . . and monsters . . . which each strong shower effaces.”So wrote James Agee in 1939. He shared this fascination with children’s street drawings and messages with his friend Helen Levitt. Here now are over one hundred of her photographs, made in the years between 1938 and 1948. Most of these pictures have never before been published. They have been selected and arranged by the photographer and carefully reproduced.Robert Coles has written especially for this book an essay on the imaginative live of children and of a time when “. . . children still had some visual independence, some keen-eyed interest in laying pictorial claim to the world around them. . . . I have not seen scenes such as Helen Levitt offers in my wanderings through America’s city streets twenty and thirty and forty years after these were taken. They offer, then, a look backward—though they are also timeless in certain aspects. For children will never really stop being tempted by their imaginative faculties to show and tell—to let others see what they find themselves conceiving in thought and fantasy and dream.”

Genres: Photography

105 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1987

About the author

Helen Levitt was an American photographer and cinematographer. She was particularly noted for her street photography around New York City. David Levi Strauss described her as "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."
A retrospective exhibition of Levitt's work, In the Street, was shown at The Photographers' Gallery in London from October 2021 to February 2022.

Reviews

[Carolina de Goes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Levitt is genius.

When we think of photos of children, we think, aw cute! But these kids are mean and they are going to creep you out. These kids here are not naive, they are streetwise and walk around in gangs. They'll bust your ass if you mess with them.

Levitt hung out with these kids for a while so they would get comfortable around her enough so she'd get candid pictures. And boy, are they candid. I imagine walking around with a camera strapped to you at that time must have been pretty attention-catching (and so it still is up to this day), but Levitt managed to walk and click among the kids like a ghost. It's as if she weren't there at all, with the kids just going on with their usual business.

This is highly original work, there's nothing else of the kind.