New York in the 1970s and 80s is commonly represented as a hellhole – “a crumbling, crime-ridden, garbage-swamped disaster zone where nobody in their right mind would want to live”, as author Tim Lawrence puts it in his foreword to the new photography book I Hear Music in the Streets: New York 1969–89. But, Lawrence contends, this was a mythology largely at odds with lived experience. Yes, there was poverty, dilapidation and crime, exacerbated by public-sector cuts and other external pressures, but this was also a time of great creativity, solidarity and social liberation, as the book makes abundantly clear.
This image by the ‘supreme poet-photographer’ captures a 70s street scene imbued with rough-edged authenticity and easy elegance
In many ways, Helen Levitt is the perfect photographer to deliver such a corrective. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, she spent the best part of seven decades roaming New York’s streets and capturing the people she met – often children at play – with a perceptive, unsentimental eye. She spent much of that time in working-class neighbourhoods in the Lower East Side and Harlem, but rather than seek out scenes of deprivation and misery, as some of her better-known contemporaries did, she was more interested in observing people simply going about their day, using subtle details to transcendent effect. Adam Gopnik called her “the supreme poet-photographer of New York”.
This 1972 image of a man and two children on a stoop doesn’t gloss over the rough edges. The clothes here are nothing fancy. The concrete doorframe is chipped and we can assume from the piece of cardboard the man is sitting on that the steps are grimy. But there’s an easy elegance to the scene, emanating from the various postures and the angle of the man’s hat. Even the baby, with the earring and box-fresh trainers, exudes an understated cool. None of them seem aware of Levitt, who often used a right-angle viewfinder to shoot scenes side-on, to minimise self-consciousness in her subjects.
You can almost feel the buzz and hear the music on the street. If it was a toss-up between early 70s New York and the sanitised, overpriced place it’s become now, I know in a heartbeat which one Id choose.
I Hear Music in the Streets: New York 1969-89, edited by Guillermo M Ferrando, is published by La Fábrica on 11 November
Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Helen Levitt
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