Helen Levitt’s enigmatic street photography bursts into Madrid

Madrid. His workplace was the street and his city, New York. In these two settings she recorded with her camera, a 35 millimeter Leica, her most iconic images, in which there is enigma, commitment, social sensitivity and rawness, which is why Helen Levitt (1913-2009) has become one of the great figures of 20th century photography, hence the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid is exhibiting for the first time a major retrospective that includes snapshots from her trip to Mexico in the early 1940s, when she was searching his own vision and which, in the end, became the only trip he made in his life in order to expand his collection.

Throughout the exhibition, a comprehensive tour of Levitt’s career is made through 200 images, among which are unpublished works, in addition to the film In The Streetdirected by herself along with Janice Loeb and James Agee. One of the most valuable documents in the exhibition due to the importance it had in her life, was the photograph that Henri Cartier-Bresson gave her of some newspaper sellers on Ecuador Street in Mexico City, which he himself showed to Levitt in 1935 and that somehow led her to make the trip to our country a few years later, but above all it helped her find her own perspective. The dedication, dated 1981, says: “I made this photo in 1934 with my own hands, in Mexico City, on Ecuador Street and I showed it to Helen Levitt in 1935 in New York.”

That trip to Mexico served to consolidate his language, his perspective, which had already matured with his first great works in his city, especially in his neighborhood, Brooklyn, where he shows a social reality full of questions and harshness, but at the same time with a clear narrative, respectful intimacy and universal emotions.

Social concern

The curator of the exhibition, the expert Josua Chuang, explained that “he felt a great social concern”, due in large part to his own origin: he was born in 1913 into a Russian-Jewish family settled in the streets of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, as well as to the early attraction he felt for art and his interest in cinema, the avant-garde and surrealism.

After working in a photography studio in the Bronx, he joined the New York Film and Photo League, where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose influence was decisive in Levitt’s dedication to his profession.

In 1934 he bought his first camera, a 35 millimeter Leica, and after learning some lessons from Henri Cartier-Bresson (the search for the moment, closeness to the image and the need to operate with an independent and autonomous spirit) he entered the streets of New York.

Levitt always preferred the marginality of the shores to the neatness of the urban centers, and during the 1930s and the postwar period he portrayed an unusual New York, with unpaved sidewalks and streets populated by blacks, the poor, gypsies and children who played in the middle of the city. His color photography is included in the exhibition, although some of this material was lost after a robbery in his apartment in 1970.

Curator Chuang warned that there is a vital period in his life and a trip to Mexico, the only one he took to take photographs. “In 1941 Levitt spent five months in Mexico, which was a turning point in his artistic career, since there he also took street photographs, but in these, unlike those he had taken in New York, there is no sense of play or lyricism, but rather they are raw scenes, largely of homeless people and the lowest layers of society.”

The exhibition will remain open to the public at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid until May 17.