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Kid’s play: 8 decades of Helen Levitt’s stunning New York City street photography

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In 1940, a trio of young photographers Helen Levitt, James Agee and Janice Loeb used hidden cameras to film everyday street life in and around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue of New York’s Spanish Harlem. The footage was then edited together by Levitt and released as a short film In the Street in 1948. The film is now associated more with Levitt’s career as a street photographer than with Agee—who had an award-winning career as a novelist and screenwriter of films like The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955)—or Loeb—who had a career as an artist and was married to Levitt’s brother Bill. Both Agee and Loeb were instrumental in encouraging Helen Levitt’s career as filmmaker and photographer during the 1950s and 1960s.

Born in Brooklyn in 1913 to a Russian-Jewish family who ran a wholesale knitwear distributor, Levitt decided from an early age that the family business was not for her and that she wanted to study photography. She quit school and had an apprenticeship in developing and printing at a local portrait photographer’s studio. At nineteen, Levitt studied with the photographer Walker Evans, a pioneer of documentary photography who was best known for his powerful images of farmers during the Great Depression as published in the book he collaborated on with Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Sometime in 1937, Levitt noticed children drawing with chalk in the streets. She watched them playing unselfconsciously, intensely interested in what they were doing. It was a moment of perspicacity that set Helen Levitt off documenting the children and the street scenes she encountered over the next eight decades—shooting with her eyes for others to see.
 
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More of Helen Levitt’s work plus the film ‘In the Street’ after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.23.2016
10:13 am
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‘Sex within 5 seconds of meeting you’: Asian adult film titles caption New Yorker cartoons
05.01.2014
10:27 am
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Canadian prankster Morgan El-Kabong and his partner in cultural sabotage Bonnie Brekelmans have created the Tumblr page “New Yorker High Class Soap,” a collection of New Yorker cartoons (plus one “Garfield”) détourned with literal translations of Asian adult film titles, to goddamn hilarious effect.

There is nothing I can add to this except my vigorous applause.
 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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05.01.2014
10:27 am
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Dangerous Minds on The New Yorker blog
01.12.2012
06:43 pm
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Eustace Tilley in 3-D by ELMARIELITO

Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker’s pop critic is enthusiastic about Dangerous Minds in 2012!

He writes on The New Yorker “Culture Desk” blog:

Anyone who grew up in record stores knows the cast: the guy who stood next to the register and talked, without surcease, to whoever was stuck behind the counter. The army-jacketed loafs who kept trying to shoplift the same album. The girl who would walk in every day, ask for a single and then walk out, disgusted, until the record arrived. And the guy, sometimes older, who would walk up quietly during a pause in the not-very-active action and say “Have you ever heard…?” Invariably, whatever he was asking about was the most obscure thing you’d encountered that day. Much better, some of these things were worth tracking down and learning from: Sun Ra’s “Disco 3000,” the full-length version of Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel,” or Siouxsie and the Banshees’ cover of Ben E. King’s “Supernatural Thing.”

You’ll notice that the original 1975 seven-minute-plus version of “Little Johnny Jewel” isn’t on YouTube, and neither is the 1981 B-side version of Siouxsie’s “Supernatural Thing.” (Both are on Spotify, though, and I’ve put them on this list, which will change throughout the year and attempt to hold your attention.) But if they did show up on the Web, Dangerous Minds would find it before you. Footage of Morrissey appearing on “Pop Quiz” in 1984, and knowing more about Billy Fury than any American would? Got it. Deborah Harry playing trumpet with Blondie on German TV in 1977? Check. The site leans towards pop detritus from the seventies and eighties but also dips into political commentary and cultural zingers such as this fantastic video about a beauty product called “Fotoshop, by Adobé.”

Read more:
Enthusiasms 2012: The Minds Behind Dangerous Minds (The New Yorker)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.12.2012
06:43 pm
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