Button to a Secret Passage

Helen Levitt was one of the most important female photographers working in the mid-20th century. A master of wry yet poignant reportage, Levitt was captivated by the performative space of the city street. The vast majority of her prolific career was spent documenting New York City, capturing the beauty and the lyricism found amidst the grit while also being attuned to the surrealism of the everyday.

Levitt began taking photographs when she was 18 and learned to develop prints when she started to work for a commercial photographer in the Bronx. In 1936 she purchased a Leica, which was the camera of choice for many photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose work partly inspired Levitt to pursue her own personal projects, away from commercial incentives.

In the late 1930s, Levitt began teaching art classes to children as part of the NYC Federal Art Project. From this point onwards, children became a recurring subject within her work. She photographed them at play on the streets of New York, clambering over buildings and running amuck. She also captured their quieter moments, as in Girl with lily and Boy comforting other boy, NYC. These photographs carry an immediacy and emotional potency that remains legible now, more than 75 years after they were taken.

Some of Levitt’s photographs slide into the absurd and she was particularly fascinated with the masks children would wear during Halloween festivities, and her scenes of masked children set against brutal urban landscapes are almost dreamlike. This penchant for the strange also inflected her images of children’s chalk graffiti. Like a bowerbird, Levitt was drawn to these chalk drawings, eventually publishing a book of them in 1987 titled In the street: chalk drawings and messages New York City 1938-1948. Among these chalk drawing photographs, Button to a secret passage, is one of the most compelling. It so aptly encapsulates the way Levitt saw the urban space: as a site filled with eruptive and transformative potential.