Helen Levitt New York c.

1945
B 1913 New York, New York, USA Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1970
D 2009 New York, New York, USA 6 * × 9 ¾ in. (17.3 × 24.7 cm)
Gift of Janice Levitt. 1984

There’s no hip distance between labor and leisure for four busy children this city summer, no tedium
to appease the mise-en-scène, and the boundaries between home and the road home, friendship
and kinship, blackness and tenderness, young and ancient, interruption and dream, play and survival,
are blurring. Four little girls face a stone wall and gaze at a network of soap bubbles, translucent,
transient circles hovering with suspicious stillness, apparitions or agents of surveillance, some
double infinity invading the girls and their ghosts, teasing them into embracing their natural-born
omniscience. As an interrogation of the innocent the bubbles seem cruel. A blanket of mist adds
to the dialectic between fun and suspense. If you had never seen a city you might wonder if the
scene is a fancy cage selling Armageddon and patience, you might wonder why there are live bodies
in this vacant cemetery, you might call the desolation a scam or the whole scene propaganda for
some gentrified promise of playfulness in the panopticon.
The girls’ stances are almost identical, straight backs, heads turned left mid-stride, one
foot behind the other in a kinetic curtsy that looks both staged and as natural as casually floating
bubbles—it’s all so delicate and frigid and warm and tender at the same time. The photograph uses
urban bleakness to supervise the children, the enclosure is looking at them while they gaze toward
the see-through spheres of soap and purpose. They are an ensemble as objectified and deflatable
as their quiet muses the bubbles, floating globes of hygienic vision. For the spectator the girls
become the bubbles: think about four little girls who will surely burst, whose bodies are one breeze
or fast-passing train away from obliteration, disintegration, magnetic nothingness. What makes
the photo powerful is its breathless atmosphere of a mirror on the wall of a prison whose petite
inmates await sentencing, its sense of never-ending ennui with mass reproduction, its glimmers
of haloed energy among the cloned. Black bodies rarely get the luxury of exemplifying this photo’s
dismissiveness of spectacle. That makes it feel subversive, like the preamble to a risk worth taking.
A precarious calm or jumpy serenity gasps the scene into being. This is an atmosphere you
want to breathe, a heat you long to strut through as indifferently as these girls, three black one white,
the largest one functioning like a matron though still a child. They wear dainty summer dresses or
jumpsuits and slouchy socks peeking out from buckle shoes, they look relaxed and alert like birds
of prey not hungry enough to swoop. Ready for church or double Dutch, they glance toward play,
knowing that if they seize on it, it will evaporate. Leisure, pleasure, play, in a land of concrete
and machinery and racial tension, feel like an apparition. Kids in any metropolis often feel like the
only surviving flowers, the only chance at redemption a city has. What’s left is intrepid girlchildren
marching toward their uncertain future. I’m reminded of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
(1993), wherein a clairvoyant child who feels everyone else’s pain has to endure several resurrections
as she pretends to casually bike through grief with the rest of the community. These four girls are
those several resurrections, urging us back to ourselves with a soft abandon that feels nervous, too
deliberate, too casual, and too serious at the same time. After a long gaze at them I look away—their
triumph is in demanding privacy, harboring secrets, being secrets, in how if I want to see them
I’m forced to look away like they look away, how they demand this automatic and endless turning.

Harmony Holiday

274 275
Helen Levitt New York c. 1945
B 1913 New York, New York, USA Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1970
D 2009 New York, New York, USA 6 * × 9 ¾ in. (17.3 × 24.7 cm)
Gift of Janice Levitt. 1984

There’s no hip distance between labor and leisure for four busy children this city summer, no tedium
to appease the mise-en-scène, and the boundaries between home and the road home, friendship
and kinship, blackness and tenderness, young and ancient, interruption and dream, play and survival,
are blurring. Four little girls face a stone wall and gaze at a network of soap bubbles, translucent,
transient circles hovering with suspicious stillness, apparitions or agents of surveillance, some
double infinity invading the girls and their ghosts, teasing them into embracing their natural-born
omniscience. As an interrogation of the innocent the bubbles seem cruel. A blanket of mist adds
to the dialectic between fun and suspense. If you had never seen a city you might wonder if the
scene is a fancy cage selling Armageddon and patience, you might wonder why there are live bodies
in this vacant cemetery, you might call the desolation a scam or the whole scene propaganda for
some gentrified promise of playfulness in the panopticon.
The girls’ stances are almost identical, straight backs, heads turned left mid-stride, one
foot behind the other in a kinetic curtsy that looks both staged and as natural as casually floating
bubbles—it’s all so delicate and frigid and warm and tender at the same time. The photograph uses
urban bleakness to supervise the children, the enclosure is looking at them while they gaze toward
the see-through spheres of soap and purpose. They are an ensemble as objectified and deflatable
as their quiet muses the bubbles, floating globes of hygienic vision. For the spectator the girls
become the bubbles: think about four little girls who will surely burst, whose bodies are one breeze
or fast-passing train away from obliteration, disintegration, magnetic nothingness. What makes
the photo powerful is its breathless atmosphere of a mirror on the wall of a prison whose petite
inmates await sentencing, its sense of never-ending ennui with mass reproduction, its glimmers
of haloed energy among the cloned. Black bodies rarely get the luxury of exemplifying this photo’s
dismissiveness of spectacle. That makes it feel subversive, like the preamble to a risk worth taking.
A precarious calm or jumpy serenity gasps the scene into being. This is an atmosphere you
want to breathe, a heat you long to strut through as indifferently as these girls, three black one white,
the largest one functioning like a matron though still a child. They wear dainty summer dresses or
jumpsuits and slouchy socks peeking out from buckle shoes, they look relaxed and alert like birds
of prey not hungry enough to swoop. Ready for church or double Dutch, they glance toward play,
knowing that if they seize on it, it will evaporate. Leisure, pleasure, play, in a land of concrete
and machinery and racial tension, feel like an apparition. Kids in any metropolis often feel like the
only surviving flowers, the only chance at redemption a city has. What’s left is intrepid girlchildren
marching toward their uncertain future. I’m reminded of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
(1993), wherein a clairvoyant child who feels everyone else’s pain has to endure several resurrections
as she pretends to casually bike through grief with the rest of the community. These four girls are
those several resurrections, urging us back to ourselves with a soft abandon that feels nervous, too
deliberate, too casual, and too serious at the same time. After a long gaze at them I look away—their
triumph is in demanding privacy, harboring secrets, being secrets, in how if I want to see them
I’m forced to look away like they look away, how they demand this automatic and endless turning.

Harmony Holiday

274 275