Museo Carmen Thyssen

In this exhibition, photographers Lisette Model (1901-1983) and Helen Levitt (1913-2009) exchange glances on the streets of 1940s New York. Observing the inhabitants of the city through the lenses of their 35 mm cameras, each in their own way, the two women practised a modern, original form of street photography focused on ordinary people going about their lives in a vibrant, multicultural city, which they captured with candour and honesty. In the years of the Great Depression and the run-up to the Second World War, Model and Levitt documented working-class New York neighbourhoods like Harlem and the Lower East Side, drawn by the people who populated them. However, rather than practising traditional documentary photography, aimed at exposing and criticising the social and economic situation, they merely portrayed what they saw: living, simple and genuine images of the everyday reality of city dwellers. In the photographs of both women, and then as now, the city is defined through the kaleidoscope of its street life, of the things that happen on its neighbourhood sidewalks and boulevards. 

The Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga has organised the exhibition to shine a spotlight on two of the finest and most influential female pioneers of American Street Photography in the 1940s, whose talent and relevance are clearly conveyed by the twenty photographs on loan from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections. 

Lisette Model, born in Austria and exiled in New York from 1938, forged a long career in the United States. A contributor to magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and a frequent exhibitor at the MoMA, she taught and practised a direct and more visceral form of photography than that of Levitt (“Don't shoot until the subject hits you in the pit of your stomach,” she would tell her students), composed of striking, intimate close-ups and radical frames that confront the viewer with intensely spontaneous and expressive figures. The photographs featured in the exhibition include examples from her Reflections series, snapshots of the reflections in shop windows in which the passers-by become shadows and the urban environment blends into the objects on display. Others are portraits captured on streets and in bars where the prime interest is focused on faces, bodies and clothes, the shots foreshortened to fit the frame to the figure. 

Inspired by the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, in her images from the 1930s and 1940s born-and-bred New Yorker Helen Levitt captures the happy, carefree street life of children in the city’s immigrant neighbourhoods. Devoid of criticism and compassion, these photographs offer a pleasant, lyrical vision of an intimist New York in the midst of the frenetic urban pace. Some of the images on display formed part of her first solo show at the MoMA, Photographs of Children (1943), and evidence consummate skill in combining frames, poses, gestures, expressions and movements to capture unique, fleeting moments. Similar images appear in the short film In the Street shot on those same streets in 1948 and featured as part of this exhibition. 

Lisette Model, Café Metropole, New York, c. 1946. Gelatina de plata. Colecciones Fundación MAPFRE. © 2023 Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Baudoin Lebon, Paris and Avi Keitelman, Brussels
Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. Gelatina de plata. Colecciones Fundación MAPFRE. © Estate of Helen Levitt 2023