Helen Levitt , photographer of New York

Helen Levitt

Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Helen Levitt, photographer of New York, died on March 29th, aged 95

Estate of Helen Levitt

OVER the course of her long life, many people wanted to ask Helen Levitt about her photographs. She always refused, at least as far as public pronouncements were concerned. “I’m inarticulate,” she would say. “I express myself with images.” Or, “If I could say that, I wouldn’t have to take pictures.”

The result was that few people knew her, outside professional photographers and her poker circle. And that was fine with her. She lived defiantly alone except for Binky, her tabby cat. The only photograph released of her after her death showed a not-unpretty face, crop-haired and heavily lipsticked, about to scowl. She was in her 50s then, and looked as though the camera had outraged her.

More determined interviewers tracked her to the fourth floor of the walk-up brownstone on East 13th Street where she lived for most of her life. The stairs didn’t deter her, despite her sciatica and a strange, lifelong inner-ear disorder that made her feel “wobbly” all the time. But in her last decade she found her old Leica was getting too heavy to carry about, and switched to a Contax automatic. It was a poignant moment. She had been inspired to use a 35mm Leica by Henri Cartier-Bresson, no less, after trailing him one day in 1935 as he took photographs round the wharves of Brooklyn. He became a great admirer of her work. She thought any comparison of herself with him was ridiculous.

Her pictures were mostly of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. She shot them in black and white, as silver gelatin prints, in the 1930s and 1940s and in colour dye-transfer prints in the 1960s and 1970s. In between, she got into movie-making for a while. Her theme was the same, the streets of New York. Apart from a trip in 1941 to Mexico City, she never found a better subject in her life.

The grittier parts were her particular joy. Her world was run-down streets, rubble-filled building sites, warehouses and litter-strewn front steps. This was urban photography with a vengeance: small scraps of sky, no trees. When she was going with Walker Evans in 1938, borrowing his camera as well (“of course”) as sleeping with him, he used to be afraid of going as far uptown as she did. Some of her young male subjects, lounging around in their zoot suits and fedoras, had an unmistakable air of menace. But mostly she brought back images of gossiping women and her favourite, scrambling children. A right-angle viewfinder allowed her to take the picture without them knowing, even, as Evans showed her, when riding right beside them in the subway.

Here and there

Her birthplace was in Brooklyn, where her father was in the wholesale knitwear business. She aspired to something more artistic, but found she couldn’t draw. For a time she trained in ballet, which taught her to appreciate the musculature of posing bodies and the spontaneous grace of her child subjects. After dropping out of high school she went to work in the darkroom of Florian Mitchell’s commercial portrait-photography studio on $6 a week. There she was hooked.

A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing—a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building—would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way.

Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see”. Many had a backdrop of posters, graffiti or billboards, which gave a commentary of sorts. “Special Spaghetti 25 cents.” “Post No Bills.” “Nuts roasted daily.” “Buttons and Notions, One Flight Up.” “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.” Her earliest project with her first, secondhand camera was to photograph children’s chalk drawings on the pavements. She never tried to speculate on them. What mattered was the patterns they made.

In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multicoloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.

She did not rate her own work highly. Though her original prints eventually sold for tens of thousands of dollars, she let them pile up in her apartment in boxes labelled “Nothing good” or “Here and there”. Her hopes when she started were for photographs that would make a socialist statement of some sort, but she abandoned that on Cartier-Bresson’s advice. A “nice picture”, as she reluctantly admitted some of hers were, was a work of art that had value in itself, as well as a celebration of the random, teeming work of art that is the city of New York.

John Hope Franklin

Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

John Hope Franklin, historian of race in America, died on March 25th, aged 94

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HIS chief pleasures were contemplative and patient. With watering can and clippers, he would potter in his greenhouse among hundreds of varieties of orchids. Or, standing in a river, he would wait for hours until a fish tickled his line. These were, one could say, typical historian’s amusements; very close, in rhythm and character, to the painstaking, careful accumulation of tiny pieces of fact.

And yet what John Hope Franklin collected, over a lifetime of scholarship, were scraps of horror. Five dollars for the cost of a branding iron. A deed of sale, in Virginia in 1829, for a male slave “of a yellow colour” who “is not in the habit of running away”. Or the testimony from 1860 of Edward Johnson, a black child apprentice:

I was tacon and plased with a rope a round my rists my back intiarly naked and swong up then and there Each of [the men] tuck a cow hide one on Either side and beet me in such a manner when they let me down I fanted and lay on the ground 2 hours

To these Mr Franklin could add from his own experience. The train journey to Checotah, Oklahoma, when he was six, that ended when his mother refused to move from the whites-only carriage. His father’s small law office in Tulsa, reduced to rubble after a race riot in 1921. The day he was told by a white woman whom he was helping, at 12, across the road, that he should take his “filthy hands” off her. And the warm evening when he went to buy ice cream in Macon, Mississippi—a tall 19-year-old student from Fisk University, scholarly in his glasses—only to find as he left the store that a semi-circle of white farmers had formed to block his exit, silently implying that he should not try to break through their line.

Academia offered no shelter. He excelled from high school onwards, eventually earning a doctorate at Harvard and becoming, in 1956, the first black head of an all-white history department at a mostly white university, Brooklyn College. Later, the University of Chicago recruited him. But in Montgomery, Louisiana, the archivist called him a “Harvard nigger” to his face. In the state archives in Raleigh, North Carolina, he was confined to a tiny separate room and allowed free run of the stacks because the white assistants would not serve him. At Duke in 1943, a university to which he returned 40 years later as a teaching professor, he could not use the library cafeteria or the washrooms.

Whites, he noted, had no qualms about “undervaluing an entire race”. Blacks were excluded both from their histories, and from their understanding of how America had been made. Mr Franklin’s intention was to weave the black experience back into the national story. Unlike many after him, he did not see “black history” as an independent discipline, and never taught a formal course in it. What he was doing was revising American history as a whole. His books, especially “From Slavery to Freedom” (1947), offered Americans their first complete view of themselves.

Thomas Jefferson’s wine

Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, that he loved it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given him $500 to see him through Harvard. Yet, alongside the dignity and the ready smiles, a sense of outrage burned. He longed to tell white tourists thronging Washington that the Capitol had been built by slaves, and that Pennsylvania Avenue had held a slave market, “right by where the Smithsonian is”. Profits made possible by enslaving blacks had not only allowed Thomas Jefferson to enjoy fine French wines: they had also underpinned America’s banks, its economic dynamism and its dominance in the world. The exploitation of blacks was something he admitted he had “never got over”.

Nor had America got over it, despite the march from Selma, in which Mr Franklin led a posse of historians, and Brown v Board of Education, where he lent his scholarship to help prove that the Framers had not meant to impose segregation on the public schools. The “colour line”, as he called it, remained “the most tragic and persistent social problem” the country faced. His own many black firsts—president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association, membership of Washington’s Cosmos Club—had not necessarily opened the door to others. The night before he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a woman at the Cosmos Club asked him to fetch her coat. He was overjoyed by Barack Obama’s election, but could not forget the poor, immobile blacks revealed by Hurricane Katrina.

He yearned to improve things, but wondered how. Financial reparations he was doubtful about; apologies seemed trifling. Only time, in historical quantities, seemed likely to make a difference. For some months he was chairman of Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race, a disorganised effort that ended by recommending “community co-operation”. Hostile letters poured in, mostly from people who did not think the subject worth talking about. Mr Franklin took them in his stride. He would go and work on his next book, or retire to the greenhouse, implements in hand; and practise patience.