Writing & Society Research Centre seminar

This paper examines representations of the everyday in Helen Levitt’s New York street photography of the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, I consider how this body of work unsettles and places in a dialectical relation concepts of the everyday (as the ordinary, familiar) and the extraordinary (as event, novelty). A relatively ex-centric figure in the history of American photography, I outline how Levitt’s work comprises an understated but significant intervention in cultural and visual histories of the street. Levitt’s New York departs from the dystopian and utopian conceptions of the city common to canonical modernism and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of modernity. Rejecting dominant historical paradigms which conceive the street as, for example, a site of degeneration and social anomie, or the masculine sphere of work, Levitt presents an alternative, everyday poetics of the street that foregrounds it as a stage for the imagination and play, sociality, affect and intimacy. I will also discuss Levitt’s aesthetics of the everyday – one based on a commitment to the ‘actual’ and ordinary which nevertheless foregrounds its indeterminacy and elusiveness.