Helen Levitt: Finding Place in the Spaces In-between

This presentation will explore the early work of Helen Levitt, specifically Levitt’s photographs of East Harlem chalk drawings taken during her tenure at New York City’s Federal Art Project in 1937. I aim to show how Levitt, dissenting from normative representations of the city, reveals a city transformed by play and imagination. I argue that through her continued attention to collective and marginal spaces within the urban landscape – such as sidewalks, stoops, facades, and doors – Levitt is able to offer an empowering reading of children’s ability to create, define, and transform urban space into their own, creating a place within the anonymous city street. In Levitt’s photographs, her subjects typically take ownership of this space through acts of play, giving greater seriousness and weight to this spirited ritual.
Enhanced by the context of the Federal Art Project’s goal to create and preserve American art, Levitt frames these chalk pictures as fine artworks, instances that uncover the folklore of the changing urban spaces of East Harlem and what goes on in the minds of children. Through a close look at the objects, subjects and ideas that populate the chalk drawing series, we can see the child’s effort to create and inhabit their own imagined landscape, a landscape weaved into the mutable space of the urban street. Through this creation, activation and socialization of space – real and imagined – the children create a place for themselves within the transforming city streets.