A Way of Seeing

Photographs by Helen Levitt, with an essay by James Agee. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1989.

Amazing B&W photographs - not amazing for any sort of technical brilliance, but because of the moment in time that they captured - New York during the 1940's. What you notice mostly is the shots of children, doing things that were then innocent, but today would be frightening, i.e. playing with toy guns, looking up girls' skirts, etc. What was in our collective memory as somewhat scatalogical, yet still inherently innocent, explorations into violence and sexuality, something to be worked out and grown through, today is indicative of all that is frightening in our society.

Also, I was startled by the apparent mixture of race and culture - in an era in which there was still supposedly such divisions along colour boundaries, there seemed to be a lot of black kids playing with white kids playing with hispanic kids. Maybe that was just the take that Levitt had on life at that time, but that came through.

Lastly, the obvious - no young adult males. There were only children, women, and old men. You possibly wouldn't even have noticed the lack unless you had prior knowledge that these were shot during WWII, but it is kind of haunting to realize that the country truly, indeed, had EVERY young male in a war somewhere around the world.

VG