Images as History Seminar Series: Form as Authority in the Photobooks of Helen Levitt

This talk will survey the work of American photographer Helen Levitt, who is best known for her depictions of working-class children on the streets of New York City c.1940.

Rather than consider her work within polarised social attitudes towards children as either innocent or primal, this talk argues that Levitt’s representation of the relationship between childhood and the street must be understood through her concerns with editing, movement, and public life.

Understanding Levitt’s work in relation to aggregation and sequence, rather than through the dominant lens of primitivism, romanticism and the private subject allows for a historic reappraisal of an American modernism that has largely fallen out of sight.

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