Nearly 50 years ago, when Helen Levitt and her friend Janice Loeb Levitt took their second-hand movie cameras to East Harlem, they came back with film that captured the spontaneity they saw in the streets.
A child mashing her face against a window and licking the glass. Boys pelting each other with flour sacks. Children stepping out for Halloween.But children don't play in East Harlem much anymore. People who used to go outside in hot weather have air conditioning. Street life once social now is limited by dread.
"You can't go into those neighborhoods," said Helen Levitt, who still lives in New York. "The kids now will shoot you. You take pictures, they'll think you're from the cops or something."
But some of that time remains in Levitt's photos and films, now on display at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts through Dec. 12. The exhibit premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as in Washington, D.C.; Detroit; Chicago; Vancouver and Seattle. The tour will finish at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art early next year.
Maria Morris Hambourg, associate curator of the Department of Prints and Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, said the way Levitt used the 35mm camera was unique for her time, and no one has equaled her since.
"What Helen was doing was entirely different," Hambourg said. "It's a kind of putting of the self into step with the psychic, emotional and physical activity of people on the street, specifically, the children, where so much of the unconscious, of fantasy, is motivating them.
"Helen understood this as no one has," Hambourg said. "It's timeless in that it's entering into the immemorial themes of human life, the emotional responses of people to each other, of the ongoing drama, tragedies, joys and passages of innumerable sorts of life."
Helen Levitt, who rarely grants interviews, today credits Janice Loeb as an influence on her early photography.
"She had a very highly developed eye, and I was fresh out of Brooklyn," Helen Levitt said. "Looking at various places through her eyes, I learned a lot from her."
Janice Loeb married and later divorced Helen's brother Bill. While Loeb kept her married surname, she is identified as Janice Loeb in association with Helen Levitt's exhibit.
Janice Loeb Levitt has lived in the mountains of Utah some 30 years. A painter and art historian educated at Vassar and Harvard, she lived in Paris and London until the war forced her home to New York in 1939.
Helen Levitt at that time shared a darkroom with photographer Walker Evans. It was through him the two women met.
Helen Levitt already had learned much from her association with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, particularly about surrealism and technique.
Loeb had worked 1936-37 in Paris for the Left Bank art journal "Cahiers d'Art." She became friends with many of the leading artists and intellectuals of the day through her job and the crowd at the Cafe de Flore.
Loeb's network of friends, which included Alfred Barr, director of The Museum of Modern Art, opened doors for Levitt.
Her first solo photograph exhibition at MOMA was in 1943, and shortly after, she and Loeb began sharing an apartment on the Upper East Side.
"When I had no place to stay, she put me up for a couple of years," Levitt said.
They started the street film while sharing the apartment.
"I always felt like with Janice's eye, she would be a natural for a filmmaker. She always saw things so vividly, so interestingly," she said.
Their work in 1945-46, with the collaboration of their friend, writer James Agee, became the short lyric film "In The Street," released in 1952. The art cinema classic is screened continuously in Levitt's gallery exhibition.
The subjects of "In The Street" many times did not know they were being filmed. Janice Levitt says her camera had a viewfinder that allowed the photographer to sneak footage without facing those being filmed.
Helen Levitt had used a similar technique for her photographs, remarkable for their clarity and depth of field. The small size of her 35mm camera allowed her to be discreet while she captured her urban vision.
Loeb's idea for a second film, "The Quiet One," was a docudrama about a Harlem boy and his stay at a school for delinquents, the Wiltwyck School. Sidney Meyers joined them as director and Agee wrote the commentary.
The film won a Venice Film Festival award in 1947 and was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Helen Levitt no longer likes "The Quiet One," but does like the street film, Janice Levitt says.
"The street film was sort of pure, it was like photography, only with motion. And it was abstract," she said, while "The Quiet One" told a story that could be seen as social commentary, which Helen shuns in her work.
Despite the success of her photographs, Helen Levitt said she prefers motion pictures but never had the physical endurance a feature film requires.
As a company called Film Documents, the group made a handful of short documentaries and wanted to make a feature but became distracted by their personal lives, she said.
Janice and Bill Levitt were raising their children and meantime had fallen in love with skiing.
"Someone said if you want to be sure of snow for the holidays, go to Alta, Utah," Janice Levitt said. "And we never turned back."
Their vacations extended into a permanent stay when Bill Levitt, now the mayor of Alta, bought the Alta Lodge in 1959. Janice Levitt continued to paint, but little of her work made it past her own critical eye.
"I remember at Alta doing a painting a whole summer and scraping it off every day," she said.
Both women are 80 years old, own cats, and talk to each other on the phone weekly. Janice Levitt now lives in Salt Lake City. And while Helen Levitt visited Alta once, emphysema has curtailed her travels.
Ill health also prevents her from photographing much any more, but she still does all her own printing.
New York suits her as a home. "For my kind of work, a street with lots of people is important," she said. "I'm not a landscape person."