Overview of Helen Levitt's photographs at the Kunsthal

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) is one of the founding fathers of street photography. Kunsthal will show over 220 photographs, a film and colour slides from 30 May with City at Play. Selected for the first time from her entire archive of her images of life on the streets of New York. The exhibition will be accompanied by the image-rich catalogue Helen Levitt.

Helen Levitt is considered one of the most influential photographers of her generation. Early in her career, she had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, at a time when photography was barely recognised as an art form in its own right. Her work inspired generations of photographers after her. Yet Levitt herself remained in the background. She said little about her work: "Just what you see. If it was easy to put into words, I would have become a writer."

The exhibition opens with Levitt's early photographs from the 1930s: intimate, unposed images of everyday life in Harlem, the Lower East Side and Hell's Kitchen.During these years, Levitt moves in the company of two of the twentieth century's greatest photographers: Henri Cartier-Bresson inspires her working methods, Walker Evans immediately recognises her potential and introduces her to his network. Through him, she meets writer James Agee and art historian Janice Loeb, with whom she later works closely.

From 1937, Levitt taught children in East Harlem through the Federal Art Project, a government programme offering artists work during the Great Depression. On her way to school, she photographs children's chalk drawings on walls and pavements, sometimes with the creators themselves in the picture. During the same period, Levitt also photographs Roma and Sinti families in Spanish Harlem and Yorkville. In these, the children take centre stage, often surrounded by the family's personal belongings.

Winkelsucher

Between 1938 and 1940, Levitt made her most iconic work and developed her recognisable photographic style. Using a 50mm lens, she moves close to her subjects, and with the shopucher - a special viewfinder - she looks one way while the camera points the other way. In this way, she remains virtually unnoticed. It results in images where people seem completely absorbed in themselves: a child playing with concentration, someone pausing for a moment in the bustle of the street.

In 1941, Levitt travelled to Mexico City, one of her few trips abroad, touched by Cartier-Bresson's earlier photographs there. She stays there for five months and moves into neighbourhoods outside the city centre. The images are more raw and direct than her New York work: poverty and social inequality are unmistakably present.

In the mid-1940s, Levitt, together with Janice Loeb and writer James Agee, made the groundbreaking short black-and-white film In the Street. The film complements her photography and is considered an early precursor to what would later be called cinéma vérité: a documentary form that shows everyday life as real as possible. Parallel to the film, Levitt is also working with Agee on A Way of Seeing, a book of her New York photographs. Due to setbacks, it was not published until 1965, but it has since been considered a key work within her oeuvre: the most explicit interpretation Levitt ever allowed of her own work.

Classics of street photography

In the late 1950s, Levitt chose colour, when black and white was still the norm in art photography. Thanks to a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, she is able to devote herself fully to it. City at Play presents her colour photographs from the 1960s to the early 1990s with both prints and projections, exactly as Levitt herself showed them. A bright red car against a weathered facade, pastel shades on pavements and stairs: colour becomes not an addition, but composition.

In the 1970s, Levitt returned to the New York underground, an environment she had known from the late 1930s, when she accompanied Walker Evans on his photo project Many Are Called. Now she photographs herself, and the city has changed. Graffiti covers the walls, travellers dress less formally. Yet she looks for the same things as always: a hand on the handrail, a brief conversation between strangers, a moment of stillness in a crowded carriage.

From the 1980s, when life took place less on the streets, Levitt photographed less frequently. Nevertheless, she continued until an advanced age. In 2009, she died in New York, aged 95. Her photographs can still be seen in museums worldwide and are considered among the classics of street photography.