‘Helen Levitt seems to walk invisible among children. She is young, she has the eye of a poet, and she has not forgotten the strange world which tunnels back through thousands of years to the dim beginnings of the human race.’
New York City, Helen Levitt’s defining portrait of a spirited group of boys at play in their makeshift Beau Geste headgear, invokes the mysterious and special world unique to children. A Brooklyn native, Levitt began photographing children at play in New York City streets in 1936. Armed with a Leica camera with a right-angle viewfinder and short focal length, Levitt avoided lengthy focusing and pointed her camera directly at her subjects, thereby capturing the spontaneity, joys, and mysteries of their complex, imaginary worlds.
This photograph was first championed as the lead image in Children: Photographs by Helen Levitt at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943, Levitt’s first one-woman show. Sarah Newmeyer, MoMA’s publicity director, wrote in the Museum’s press release for the exhibition, ‘Her photography is opposite in spirit and intent to that of the so-called “documentary” photographers who work with large-view cameras set up on tripods. She attempts to record the accidental in its brief second of high emotional impact, to seize the unforeseen and the quick.’
New York City earned icon status when it was published on the cover of Levitt’s first book A Way of Seeking. Initially conceived of in 1946, A Way of Seeing was ultimately published in 1965 by Viking Press in New York. A compilation of 50 photographs with an introductory essay by writer James Agee, it is a masterpiece of image sequencing that rivals Robert Frank’s The Americans and predates this seminal volume in concept by more than a decade.
Widely reproduced and exhibited from the t.mes
of its making, prints of this image are in several institutional collects
ions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Early prints have seldom been offered at auction.