The Poetics and Politics of Children's Play: Helen Levitt's Early Work

This dissertation examines the work of the American photographer, Helen Levitt. It focuses in particular on her first phase of production--the years from 1937 to 1943--when she developed an important archive of pictures documenting children's art and play encountered in the city streets. The dissertation is designed to help us understand the reasons why the subject of urban children's art and play proved so productive for Levitt in her first phase of work. Why did she return again and again to the sight of children at play in the city streets? Why did she expend so much effort collecting children's rude and crude drawings found on the pavement and the brownstone walls? What led her to envision the child as her genius loci of the urban streets, and what did she make out of the subject? Chapter one situates Helen Levitt's initial turn to the child in relation to a surge of child imagery that appeared in the visual culture of the 1930s. It maps the widespread cultural interest in urban children stimulated by Sidney Kingsley's play Dead End, and it connects Levitt's interest in children's pavement drawings to the Federal Art Project's promotion of child art making. Chapter two moves the spotlight from Levitt's interest in children's art to her sustained engagement with their play. It demonstrates that street children's play had become a popular photographic trope, and it compares Levitt's vision of children's play to other kinds of images of children circulating in visual culture. In doing so, the chapter shows how Levitt synthesized and transformed standard ideas about the representation of children, as she came to play with photography's kinship to performance, theater, and cinema. The third chapter focuses on the reception of the pictures. It tracks the initial appearance of Levitt's work in the popular picture press of the day and goes on to consider how her work was evaluated in response to her one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Setting out to complicate the current critical assumption that reads Levitt's work as apolitical, the chapter analyzes the sense of social tension that early critics discerned in the pictures. It also discusses Levitt's move from still photography to film-making in the mid to late 1940s. The fourth and final chapter expands the focus beyond the pictures of children to consider Levitt's street photography as a whole. After narrating the details of her return to still photography in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the chapter considers the question of what makes her overall body of work an important episode in the history of photography. After reviewing some of the main answers that have been offered to that question, I propose that Levitt's photographs are distinctive for their particularly feminist take on the urban streets