Experience a comprehensive overview of the work of Helen Levitt (1913–2009) at Kunsthal Rotterdam, one of the most important street photographers of the twentieth century. With over 220 photographs, a film and colour slides, drawn for the first time from her complete archive, City at Play brings more than fifty years of work together in one exhibition. Throughout her career, Levitt photographed life on the streets of New York: children playing under an open fire hydrant, women whispering in a doorway, a couple in the subway. Never posed or sensational, but full of subtle humour, tenderness and an eye for the everyday.
The exhibition takes you through the streets of New York as Levitt saw them: from intimate street photographs in Harlem and Hell's Kitchen in the 1930s, through her groundbreaking turn to colour in the late 1950s, to the changed city she captured in the New York subway in the 1970s. You see how she refined her eye while spending decades in search of the same things: the fleeting moment, the unguarded glance, the life that unfolds between people on the move. Alongside her photography, the exhibition also features her short film In the Street, an early forerunner of what later would be called cinéma vérité. In City at Play, you immerse yourself in the work of a pioneer of street photography.
The exhibition is organized in close collaboration with Fundación Mapfre.
