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Helen Levitt, fotógrafa de las calles de Nueva York

Retrataba a la gente humilde en sus rutinas diarias

DAVID ALANDETE 10/04/2009

 

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Helen Levitt and not your Leica stroll in New York. This photographer photographers member of the royal right of the target, died Sunday March 29 to 95 years old. Little known by ordinary mortals, but adored by many professionals in their trade, Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913, and rarely left the city of New York. When he did, like a business trip to Mexico in 1941, returned with a series of photographs that may well have been taken in those areas of the Big Apple that he loved.

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did not finish high school and very young he apprenticed as a photographer in the Bronx, practicing the technique before going to test their own frames. He was the master Henry Cartier Bresson who changed his life: "When I saw pictures of Cartier Bresson realized that photography could be art ... and that made me ambitious," he once said.

The game, a constant

Reluctant to talk about his life, modest by imposing their own, away from the artificial lights of New York art world, Helen Levitt and photographed what can not be photographed: children playing in the streets of New York in the thirties and forties. They were the children of another major crisis, the crash 1929, which marginalized his bad fortune playing ignorant. With his usual dry, told The New Yorker magazine in 2001 that, despite everything, she did not like especially children. "People think it does. But no ... Not more than other people. Just happened they were the children who were in the street. "

The game is a constant theme in his powerful black and white images, a form of social relationship when American consumerism had not invaded everything. Households not yet organized around television. "That was before television and air conditioning," Levitt said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune newspaper in 2003. "The people gathered in the street. If you stayed long enough, they forgot that you were there. "Then came the decisive moment in which she captured the instant, following the philosophy of Cartier Bresson.

children disguised themselves with masks, driving tricycles, climbing over the walls, laughing and having fun. Levitt took his camera and got caught up in English Harlem. "It was a great neighborhood to take pictures," he said in an interview on public radio NPR in 2006. "Many things were happening. The older people sat on the steps of their homes to beat the heat."

both his shots in Harlem and the Lower East Side, Levitt portrays the poor, the disadvantaged capeaban misfortune with humor and enjoying the daily routine. His picture, like Cartier Bresson, is aware social. But despite himself. These are the photographs that speak, not the photographer: "I never want to say anything in my photographs. People ask me what they mean. And I have no valid answers," said the Tribune in 2003. "You see what there is."

Besides being a friend of Cartier Bresson, it was Walker Evans, photographer of the Great Depression. Both toured New York subway in the thirties. They shared a development lab and he taught her to not be swayed by sentimentality behind the lens, to stay out of what he photographed.

worked in the forty con Luis Buñuel, a quien ayudó en sus cortos de propaganda pronorteamericana en la II Guerra Mundial. Entre 1949 y 1959 se dedicó al cine, para volver a la fotografía y experimentar con el color en los años sesenta. En la década de los noventa renunció al color porque no podía controlar las tonalidades tanto como le hubiera gustado. La dependencia de un laboratorio ajeno no la contentaba, así que sus últimos trabajos son, en cierto modo, un regreso a sus orígenes. Pero ya nada fue lo mismo: su ciática le impidió positivar sus fotos, la Leica se volvió demasiado pesada, los niños abandonaron la calle y Nueva York se convirtió en una megalópolis. El suyo será, para siempre, un testimonio privilege of a past that will not come back.