Helen Levitt – City at Play

Street photography

Throughout her career, Levitt photographed life on the streets of New York: children playing in the spray from a fire hydrant, women whispering to one another in a doorway, a couple in love on the Underground. Never posed or sensational, but with subtle humour, tenderness and an eye for the ordinary.

Exhibition

The exhibition takes you through the streets of New York as Levitt saw them: from intimate street photographs in Harlem and Hell’s Kitchen from the 1930s, through her revolutionary switch to colour in the late 1950s, to the changing city she captured in the New York Underground in the 1970s. You’ll see how she refined her vision whilst continuing to seek the same thing for decades: the fleeting moment, the unconscious glance and the life that unfolds amongst people on the move. Alongside her photography, her short film In the Street is also on display, an early precursor to what would later be known as cinéma vérité. In City at Play, you’ll be introduced to the work of a pioneer of street photography. This exhibition has been organised in close collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.