Yesterday Bill Burke discussed ’surveillance photography’ with the Evidence class. Eric Salomon, Walker Evans (subway photographs), Merry Alpern, Luc Delahaye, Angelo Rizzuto, Kurt Cavielzel, William Kline, among others were discussed. We also talked briefly about Helen Levitt’s street photography. Though she often used a right angle viewfinder on her Leica, she continuously captured subjects that are seemingly unaware of the camera even without the attachment. A few of her color photographs were projected during the class and I remembered just how much I love that work.

New York, 1980
© Helen Levitt

New York, 1963
© Helen Levitt

I was looking up the book, Slide Show, and came across an interesting NPR interview that gave me a real sense of Levitt’s personality, her quiet and secluded nature. She has few words. But in the interview, shes touches on her inspiration for making photographs in the first place:

And at one point I saw the photographs of Cartier-Bresson and I realized that photography could be an art. That made me ambitious; I wanted to try to do something like that… making a picture that would stand up by itself.

Maybe it’s this personality of Levitt’s that that allowed her to make such interesting photographs of the everyday. The color photographs are lyrical and gentle in Levitt’s own way, giving us a unique view of New York and urban life. She doesn’t much enjoy talking about her own photographs — “inarticulate” she calls herself, but that her way of speaking is through the images.

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