In the Street

Levitt was assistant of Luis Buñuel during the Second World War, editing American propaganda films for Latin America, produced by the Museum of Modern Art. In 1945-46 she created a short film in Super8 with writer James Agee and her friend Janice Loeb, an artist and historian. In the Street is considered one of the first American experimental films: a succession of compact, silent dramas shot in East Harlem, just like all her photographs. In the forties, that was a territory untouched by modernism, far from Rockefeller Center and the first signs of what Rem Koolhaas has called Manhattanism.
‘The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theatre and a battleground,” James Agee wrote for the introduction of In the Street. The street as common space, a place of exchange and circulation. Children, women sitting on the pavement, young seducers, a marginal, jobless population, whose gestures and passions she records with evident relish for the archaic, the magical, the Dionysian, the burlesque. Far from Rooseveltian humanism and sociology. Far from the silent, monumentalist vision of the period’s male photographers.
One of the things that make Levitt’s photographs relevant today is that they exhibit an insistently unspectacular way of seeing. Her street society is the society of the unspectacle – a vision of ordinary virtue.