The Photographers Gallery opens a new show of Helen Levitt's work on 15th October. What a treat this will be... The American street photographer, in an age when street work was still relatively simple to make, mainly because people were either not very aware of cameras or because they wanted their pictures taken, shot almost all her work in New York. She died in 2009 at the age of 95 and was, to all intents and purposes, little known outside the closed circle of photography. Indeed  American poet and cultural critic David Levi Strauss memorably described Helen Levitt as “maybe the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time”. That was in 1997. Has much changed? Possibly not although her carefully curated show by Walter Moser, first shown at Arles in 2019, gained a lot of attention. And now, here it is in London.

Moser says “For too long, there had been this received notion that Levitt’s photographs are lyrical and poetic, words that are too often applied lazily to the work of female photographers. The truth is that Levitt was part of a highly intellectual cultural and political milieu in New York in the 1930s and her photography reflected her deep interest in surrealism, cinema, leftwing politics and the new ideas that were then emerging about the role of the body in art.” So, far more nuanced and subtle than she may have been perceived as.

Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her interest in photography blossomed when, aged 18, and having dropped out of high school, she began working in the darkroom of a commercial portrait photographer. Five years later, she bought a secondhand 35mm camera. A quiet and solitary figure on the streets of New York she worked to build relationships with people and expected them to be aware of her. This gives her photographs a very different quality to much of the work which came later, male egos and secretiveness leading to some extremely different styles to hers.

Moser describes her style thus - “They are knowing participants in her photographs – looking at her, smiling at her, flirting or striking a pose for her camera, though often she crops her photographs to take out these overt acknowledgments of her presence. On one level, her photography is essentially a performative exchange and that lends it a very contemporary resonance.”

Despite her shyness she met and worked briefly with Cartier-Bresson and, later, Walker Evans both of whom she was influenced by. She was a participant in the Film and Photo League in New York and this led her to discover both European and Soviet Union artistic thinking and developments, including surrealism and contemporary dance, leading her to consider her aesthetics in a new way - through movement and dance. The fact remains that Levitt was a very private person who lived a quiet life, never marrying. Her motivations were rarely spoken by her and so what remains is supposition through observation.

You can find out more about Levitt here , in this article in The Guardian or at Lens Culture. The show runs until 13th February 2022.