Slow Looking: Helen Levitt

01:10pm - 01:10pm, Fri 26 Apr 2024

A girl squats beside the rear tyre of an avocado green car, body and face twisted away from the camera.

Slow Looking: Helen Levitt

View five photographs by Helen Levitt, listen to the audio descriptions and/or download the audio description transcripts below.

These audio descriptions have been produced by Eleanor Margolies for the exhibition Helen Levitt: In the Street and for an online Slow Looking event. Scroll down to view the works, along with the recorded audio descriptions and their related transcripts.

Biographies:

One of the most influential street photographers of the 20th Century, Helen Levitt (1913-2009) spent decades documenting local communities in her native New York, capturing everyday city life in neighbourhoods such as the Lower East Side, Bronx, and Spanish Harlem.

Eleanor Margolies is a writer and audio describer. She has a background in puppetry and theatre design, with interests in ecology and the role of the senses in performance. She audio describes in museum, theatre and dance contexts, and has led architectural tours for Open House London.

These audio descriptions are part of the education programme for Helen Levitt: In the Street and are supported by the US Embassy London.

Five boys climb or stand atop the portico entrance of a brick building.

Nine children stand and squat around the large empty frame of a broken mirror on a busy city pavement.

An older man boards a bus, hands at his side looking forward.

A man and a woman sit side by side facing the camera on a subway carriage, with two small children - one on the man's lap, the other between them.

A girl squats beside the rear tyre of an avocado green car, body and face twisted away from the camera.