Exhibitions
Last days to discover the universe of Helen Levitt at the KBr Center of the Mapfre Foundation
Helen Levitt and the poetics of everyday life: New York as a setting for games, encounters and ephemeral moments captured with urban sensitivity.
The KBr Center of the Mapfre Foundation in Barcelona is hosting an essential retrospective of Helen Levitt, one of the key figures in 20th century photography. The exhibition, which will be on view until February 1, allows for multiple readings, but especially highlights the way in which New York becomes the epicenter of this photographic universe.
Levitt began capturing his hometown in the late 1930s, focusing on the humblest neighborhoods, such as Hispanic Harlem or the Lower East Side, where daily life unfolds among the streets. His gaze was particularly fixed on children and their games in the streets, sensitively capturing moments of everyday life that today become a fascinating testimony of the city and its people.
She is one of the most relevant photographers of the 20th century in the field of urban photography, and her work is deeply linked to New York, not only as a backdrop, but as the true protagonist of the scenes that she captures with a poetic sensitivity.
New York City, one of the artistic capitals of recent decades, becomes the everyday setting of Levitt's photography. The photographer portrays neighborhoods and repeats elements that become iconic in her urban scenes. Levitt focuses above all on everyday life in public spaces: sidewalks, corners, walls and steps of buildings. These squares and streets were not just places of passage, but also stages where social life unfolded in all its forms, from children's play to meetings between neighbors.
His photographs show children drawing with chalk on the sidewalks, transforming the streets into a large stage for play and spontaneous performances, people sitting on the steps in front of doors, chatting, crossing paths in everyday interactions, graffitied facades or with ephemeral messages that became visual compositions within the urban narrative.
For Levitt, the city was almost an improvised theater: every street, every corner could offer unexpected scenes, spontaneous characters, plays of light and shadow and compositions full of poetry. His camera did not pursue monuments or iconic landscapes, but rather captured the beauty hidden in the everyday, a group of children playing on the sidewalk, a gesture of a passerby, the way someone leans on a ladder, small, seemingly trivial details that, under his lens, became micro-scenes full of life and sensitivity.
