As Levitt roamed the streets of New York in
1939 and 1940, she collected in her camera a record of the fears and fantasies
of children exuberantly expressed with chalk on the city’s pavement and walls.
The writer James Agee, who had met Levitt in 1937 through Walker Evans and who
greatly admired her work, described “drawings, all over, of phalli, fellatio,
ships, homes, airplanes, western heroes, women, and monsters dredged out of the
memories of the unspeakable sea-journeys of the womb, all spangling the walks
and walls, which each strong shower effaces.” When some of Levitt’s
chalk-drawing photographs (including the embracing cowboy couple shown here)
were reproduced in the Sunday magazine PM
Weekly in March 1941, its art director, the photographer Ralph Steiner,
wrote, “Most photographers use their subject matter—nature, man, man’s work—as
a means of showing how great they are
rather than how wonderful the world is. No photographer with a great sense of
his own importance would have taken these portraits of what goes on inside the
minds of children.” The unassuming modesty implicit in such pictures—and indeed
in all those in which she allowed her subjects to act without direction or
interference—remained an essential trait of Levitt’s personality and
photographic philosophy throughout her life.