City life filled with charm in Helen Levitt’s images

Though the crowds are rightfully flocking to the “Gordon Parks: Segregation Story” photography exhibition at the High Museum, a smaller exhibition flanking that show hosts another fascinating photographer worth checking out, Helen Levitt.

“Helen Levitt: In the Street” features 30 works, most in black and white, from the artist’s heyday in the New York City of the 1930s and 1940s, which she captures as a vibrant tapestry of buzzing activity and mini human dramas.

Helen Levitt was a contemporary of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson and — like French master Cartier-Bresson, whom she shadowed for a time — took the street as her metier. There Levitt reveled in the intimacy of watching people going about their daily lives guileless and unguarded. Her photographs capture a vibrant street life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem before television sucked everyone indoors.

Straight out of Brooklyn herself, Levitt had a clear affinity for the social space of the street. She captures mothers and grandmothers catching up on front stoops, and the lives of children playing out in the open when apartments were too small, too hot or too socially constricting. Her New York of the ’30s and ’40s is a land of free-range waifs where fire hydrants, vacant lots and castaway junk found on the street are the stuff of playful exploration.

Many of the kids are what might be termed ragamuffins today, with torn clothes and dirty, worn-out shoes. They are far from the chubby-cheeked, tow-headed moppets of Dick and Jane books or advertising images. These kids are endearingly scrappy and tough in a way you would expect of children whose landscape is bookended by car exhaust and asphalt.

The Levitt images featured in “In the Street” give a terse encapsulation of her style in capturing moments of solitude and chaos. Of the former, there is a tender shot of two African-American boys perched on the curb, one crying and the other comforting his friend, or at least trying to discern the reason for his angst. Their arms are intertwined in a lovely affirmation of the earnestness of small children.

A more chaotic moment is captured in a 1940 image as a pair of boys hold up a large wooden frame and others crouch down to pick up the shards of glass that have fallen from it. A group of other boys are observers of the scene, including one perched on a bicycle and perfectly centered in the wooden mirror frame; an echo of the photographer’s gaze. It’s one of those exciting adventures that can define a child’s day: a discovery to be fussed over and talked about.

Levitt sees the enchanted dimension to childhood, where every day is ripe with possibility and the air hums with potential. One sublime shot that brilliantly illustrates the photographer’s mastery of empty space and perspective shows four little girls walking down a sidewalk, their backs to us. Their attention is arrested by a cluster of soap bubbles that hang on the air like pixie dust. There are few distractions, just the sidewalk, the street and a brick wall in the distance, so that the children and the bubbles seem lost in their own private reverie.

The work featured in “In the Street” is light, buoyant and humanistic. People tend to be seen in the best possible light, as nonchalantly charming, or at the very least intriguing, engaged in the ordinary business of going about their day. Levitt ennobles the poor and the overlooked, finding an ebullient sweetness and sense of discovery at the heart of city life.