A Compendium of Obsolete Objects

 

A new book takes readers on a journey through futures past via the objects humans have replaced, left behind, and forgotten
 
Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects is about artefacts and technology that once populated the world. Some were once ubiquitous; others barely made it into existence, not much more than an idea or a prototype. We’re interested not simply in why these things – some of them once highly familiar – disappeared, but in what their disappearance tells us about the world we’ve created for ourselves.
 
Many of the extinct objects here – and we look at four of them below – offer alternative visions of how we might deal with problems in ways both large and small. They represent other ways of thinking, making and interacting with the world. Ultimately, every extinct object embodies a vision of the future – a vision that, even if the object itself has been superseded, is still available to us today.
 
Arsenic Wallpaper, by Lucinda Hawksley
 
In the mid-19th century, arsenic was well known as a rat poison, and was used in homes across Britain to control vermin – yet arsenical pigments were also employed to colour furniture, clothing, children’s toys and even food (often with fatal results).
 
Following the Great Exhibition in 1851, which showcased a number of wallpaper manufacturers, there grew a new fashion for what most Victorians called “paper hangings”. The most famous wallpaper designer of the age was William Morris. His company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (later simply Morris & Co) that made his name synonymous with wallpaper – and one of his favoured pigments was an arsenical green. In fact, while history now associates arsenic solely with the colour green, it became used in the production of most wallpaper colours, meaning that almost every wallpaper design from the period was liberally laced with poison.
 
In 1862, newspapers around Britain reported the death of a three-year-old girl named Ann Amelia Turner in the East End of London. Much was made of the tragedy of her death, because she was the fourth child of the family’s four to die. Her bereft parents, and the local community, were told initially that the others’ deaths had been caused by diphtheria. With Ann Amelia’s illness, however, a doctor questioned that diagnosis: diphtheria was hugely contagious, yet none of the neighbours had been ill. Soon it became apparent that all four children had died from arsenic poisoning, caused by green wallpaper in the Turner home.

 
Journalists were soon on a crusade to expose the health problems experienced by workers in wallpaper factories – but the problem continued to be ignored. Customers wanted arsenical-green paper hangings, and designers were happy to oblige. Not everyone living with such wallpaper was affected, and those who did become ill weren’t necessarily affected in the same way as other sufferers. It took a long time for scientists to discover that – aside from the risk of children licking the walls – the main danger lay in an invisible arsenious gas that emanated from wallpaper in damp, and especially mouldy, conditions.
 
Both Morris and his business partner Edward Burne-Jones decorated their homes with arsenic wallpaper, and neither they nor their families suffered obvious ill effects. Morris became furious about the clamour for wallpaper to be free of arsenic – but when the public began talking with their wallets, he was smart enough to listen. The very first arsenic-free wallpaper to be produced in Britain was made by the forward-thinking William Woollams & Co in 1859; in 1875, Morris & Co proudly proclaimed on its new catalogues that all its wallpapers were free of arsenic too.
 
No legislation was ever passed in the British Isles to prevent the use of arsenic in the manufacture of wallpaper. The extinction of arsenic wallpaper here was achieved entirely by campaigning doctors and journalists, and a consequent change in public opinion. Yet in private, Morris compared the furore to the historic witch-hunts in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1885, he would write to his friend Thomas Wardle: “As to the arsenic scare, a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine: the doctors were bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever.”
 
Edison’s Anti-Gravitation Under-Clothing, by Bob Nicholson
 
In December 1878, Punch forecast that the coming year would bring a surprising invention: “Edison’s Anti-Gravitation Under-Clothing” would soon “enable the Wearer thereof to suspend at will the Force of Gravity”. Anybody who donned a set of this high-tech American underwear would be granted the power to fly effortlessly around a room, propelled only by the gentle wafting of a handheld fan. The accompanying cartoon, by George Du Maurier, depicted fashionable Victorians floating gracefully towards the ceiling of the Royal Academy.
 
This was, of course, a joke: anti-grav undies existed only in the imagination. It was one of many fanciful contraptions dreamed up by Victorian humorists in the late 1870s, a period in which the world seemed to be caught in the grip of “discovery mania”. At the heart of this cultural moment was the American inventor Thomas Edison. He rose to prominence following the invention in 1877 of the phonograph, the first device capable of capturing and replaying sound. Within months, news of this breakthrough had made its creator a global household name.
 
Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic giddily dubbed Edison a modern-day “wizard”, and reporters flocked to his research laboratory at Menlo Park. His every pronouncement was dissected by newspapers that waited “in daily expectation for the announcement of new marvels”. Excitement reached fever pitch in the autumn of 1878, when Edison unveiled plans to develop a long-lasting electric light-bulb that would replace indoor gas-lighting at a fraction of the cost. By the time Punch magazine published its cartoon that December, Edison was an international celebrity, a Victorian version of a Silicon Valley tech messiah.

 
This “discovery mania” provided fertile ground for pranksters and satirists. The New York Daily Graphic, for instance, reported mischievously that Edison had invented a “Food Creator” capable of “manufacturing biscuit, meat, vegetables and wine out of air, water and common earth”. Several credulous newspapers reported it as fact, and Edison was amused to receive letters asking when his miraculous invention would be available to buy.
 
In their defence, interviews with Edison often featured outlandish promises and boastful predictions about his creations, long before they were ready for commercial use. He once suggested to an American journalist that his “aerophone” (a giant megaphone) could be installed inside the mouth of the Statue of Liberty and used to broadcast the Declaration of Independence “so loud that she could be heard by every soul on Manhattan Island”. He rose to fame at a time when the United States was imagined by European observers as a crucible of the new, a young country bristling with fresh ideas, whose citizens were imbued with a restless energy that propelled them headlong into the future.
 
Imagined objects such as “Edison’s Anti-Gravitation Under-Clothing” are by their nature ephemeral. Other 19th-century humorists imagined Edison’s phonograph inside a range of talking objects, such as hat-stands (to scold errant husbands) and lamp posts (to move on vagrants by using a policeman’s voice). And yet these wouldn’t be out of place in modern surveillance systems, or the Internet of Things. A contributor to Fun magazine, one of Punch’s rivals, imagined visiting Edison’s laboratory and being confronted by a robotic “house-dog powered by electricity” – which now exists, in the form of Boston Dynamics’ Spot. Sometimes, it seems, even the most comic visions of the future can eventually come to pass.
 
Moon Towers, by Bryony Quinn
 
In the late 19th century, all over the world, electric street-lighting brought day to night. Gas lamps and their gloomy fossil brothers had never been brilliant enough; artificial light was cleaner and clearer, and could cover a greater area. But for the next hundred years or so, as the glow of the modern light bulb became the global standard, we forgot about one ingenious but short-lived solution to the urban dark.
 
The first “moon tower” or “moonlight tower” was erected in the 1870s, and featured arc lighting, one of the earliest and most popular electric lights. Some models could reach an unbeatable glow of 6,000 “candlepower”, and they were cheaper to run and insure than gas. In municipalities across the United States, these savings led to the indiscriminate use of arc lighting throughout public and suburban spaces.
 
Yet the arc lamp was a frightening level of illumination for some humans (and animals) compared with gas-lights, which produced a glow equivalent to 16 candles. Such brightness was unfit for domestic spaces, and barely tolerated in large indoor environments such as theatres. Arc lamps, the manufacturers proposed, were best enjoyed outdoors at a distance, with between four and eight lamps mounted at the top of skeleton towers that could reach upwards of 75 m (250ft).
 
Arguments against them included the disruption of sleep, the unflattering colour the lights gave one’s appearance, and an anxiety rooted in the inability to tell night from day. But for their champions, there was the novelty of reading a newspaper or watch-face outdoors in the dark, while the notion of personal moons for every new town across America held a strong poetic appeal.

 
Soon, moon towers stood sentry-like over American cities including Austin, San Francisco, Denver and New York. In Minneapolis, an “electric moon” was reported; in Los Angeles, the towers numbered 36. For a time, the city of Detroit implemented moon towers exclusively over anything else. In total, 122 were raised across the city, set at 305–365 m (1,000–1,200ft) intervals in the centre (where they stood 53m, or 175ft, tall). The city rationalised that 100 towers would be cheaper to service than 1,000 lamps, and that they would look spectacular.
 
Moon towers were effective in open or low-built areas, where the angle of light from each tower would not throw obstructive shadows as it encountered the buildings below. At this time, however, Detroit was known as the “City of Trees” – a styling that disappeared as many trees were felled in the 20th century – and during spring and summer, especially in residential areas, the light was obscured by the canopy. When foliage was not a problem, mist was – and high-rise architecture was beginning to alter Detroit, like other US cityscapes.
 
Within just 10 years of its construction, the Detroit system had been dismantled. What was dazzling in the imagination of city planners was dark and patchy on the ground. What’s more, the incandescent light bulb had developed far enough by this time to be easily, affordably and inoffensively mounted at street level. By the start of the 20th century, any moon tower still standing in America was there as a curiosity.
 
Yet this doesn’t mean that the moon towers left no residue on the field of street-lighting worldwide. For example, in 2018, the Chinese city of Chengdu announced with great fanfare a plan to launch an artificial moon in 2020 that would illuminate an area 10–80 km (6–50 miles) wide. It was “designed to complement the Moon at night”, but eight times brighter. (The plan has not yet been realised.)
 
UV-Radiated Artificial Beach, by Maarten Liefooghe
 
Of all the defunct building types of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, children’s colonies constructed on the Belgian coast are among the most striking. They were built to prevent tuberculosis for city children through a collective stay at the seaside.
 
With few of these complexes remaining, postcards now do a better job of evoking them. Some show the colony buildings in the dunes; others depict the activities that were aimed at “strengthening” children physically and morally: eating in the refectory, sports activities, sunbathing in the dunes, as well as medical treatments. Finally, a stranger genre of postcard portrays shiny modern equipment from industrial kitchens, laundries, bathing facilities and sports halls.
 
An “artificial beach” at the De Haan Sea Preventorium, featured on a postcard from the late 1930s, is one such “extinct object”. A group of white children, each wearing protective glasses, play in a sandpit lit by UV lamps. A nurse is supervising. Beach scenes are painted on the walls, but the real coastal landscape remains behind bubbled window glass. What’s shown is the medical practice of heliotherapy and phototherapy for tuberculosis, and there are many photographs of similar artificial beaches in 1930s France.
 
From the second half of the 1920s, electric ultraviolet radiators could give precise doses of UV. This made it possible to supply shortwave radiation for tuberculosis and other treatments, even in less sunny climates and seasons, and to improve the health of the population of sun-starved nations. After sea bathing (seawater) and natural or artificial aerotherapy (healthy air by the sea or in the mountains), solar cures became the focus of the “environmental therapy” applied by children’s colonies. A postcard from the early 1930s shows Les Rayons Ultra-Violets in the preventorium Gai Séjour. Nearly-naked children step on a circular walking line marked on the floor, passing side-mounted UV radiators at regular intervals, tracing a path reminiscent of figure gymnastics.

 
It is undeniably strange to see children playing on a fake indoor beach while looking out onto a real one. Here we see on a smaller scale what an unrealised Berlin project from 1928 had envisioned. The hygienist engineer J Goldmerstein and architect Karl Stodieck had published a proposal for a new urban swimming pool: a gigantic “thermal palace” in which 17,800 adults and 15,000 children would spend several hours a day engaging in sports and sunbathing. The architect Hans Poelzig drew a domed hall spanning 150m (492ft), at its centre a terraced, artificial and heated beach surrounded by a ring-shaped swimming pool and enclosed by a gigantic painted panorama of sunny landscapes – all irradiated by UV lamps.
 
Yet the artificial beach was to become extinct when a new antibiotic treatment for tuberculosis made preventative cures obsolete. The fabric of civil and governmental organisations that set up holiday colonies was taken apart after the Second World War. Family holidays for a broadening middle class became the new norm in the 1960s. Most colony buildings were converted, redeveloped or demolished, and a few became photogenic ruins. UV lamps are still used for tanning, but since the turn of the millennium they have become suspect, as awareness of the carcinogenic effects of UV light has grown.
 
Even so, light therapy for mental well-being remains popular, as does the general belief in the health benefits of beaches – whether natural or man-made. Artificial indoor beaches continue to be built around the world, from Dubai to Singapore. Their ever more grandiose simulations promise a more complete “natural” experience than even a modernist utopian would have dared to imagine.
 
Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects is published by Reaktion at £29
 
Anti-grav underwear and ‘moon towers’: the strange world of ‘extinct’ objects.
By Lucinda Hawksley, Bob Nicholson,  Bryony Quinn and Maarten Liefoogh . The Telegraph  , 
November 21, 2021.

 

The Kodak Flashcube—a rotating cube with a miniature flashbulb incarcerated within each of its four mirrored compartments—made amateur photography of the domestic interior possible from the mid-1960s onwards. It also reduced the risk of injury presented by its forebears. Its mother, the single-use luminescent flashbulb, resembled a domestic light bulb and would project shattered glass as well as light. Its fragility disguised its ferocity. Containing magnesium filaments, the oxygen gas, once electrically ignited by the click of the camera shutter, would generate substantial residual heat and often cause painful burns. Memories should burn brightly, not painfully. The Flashcube’s grandmother, the flash lamp, carried an even greater risk of violence. Upon triggering the shutter, both photographer and subject risked being cut or even blinded should some stray glass enter the eye. Worse, photographers sometimes died when preparing the flash powder, a composition of metallic fuel and an oxidizer such as chlorate. Flash lamps maintained their market dominance for some sixty years before flashbulbs replaced them in 1929. In 1965, however, the need for greater safety and simplicity urged the Flashcube into existence.
 
Eastman Kodak’s invention of the Flashcube also emerged from the company’s specific wish to offer a flash that would work with its newly ubiquitous amateur photographers’ cameras, made popular by the white middle-class families targeted in 1960s advertising campaigns. Partnered with Kodak’s Instamatic camera, the Flashcube’s adaptability, portability, and ease of use made interior photography possible for the masses, without prerequisite skill or expertise. The impact on interior behavior as well as interior spaces was substantial. Interiors and normative domestic relations could be captured and shared, exposing the aspirational aesthetics and social arrangements of this once most private of architectures. In magazine advertisements, a woman’s hand was shown affectionately caressing a Flashcube, positioning it as a feminine technology to capture home life. In the Flashcubes’ dazzling light, families staged domestic tableaux in an effort to display their nuclear family credentials.
 
In observing the phenomenon of staging, Susan Sontag observed presciently that “needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is addicted.” And, since addiction is characterized by repetition, Flashcube “users” could click/shoot, click/shoot, click/shoot, click/shoot, discard, reload, click/shoot, click/shoot, click/shoot, click/shoot, discard, reload and so on, until the three-pack was spent. Without agency over light levels, contrast or glare, redeye was inevitable, casting an unintentionally malevolent air over many tableaux. And with each photograph, the Flashcube would make a small snapping sound, as sharp and discreet as a breaking wishbone. The four- compartment casing would feel warm for an instant, then cold, and then forever silent. With each aluminium ignition the Flashcube’s explosion remained contained within its interior, the plastic housing intact. The subjects would freeze in anticipation, to avoid the image being blurred, only to disperse their familial tableau seconds later, momentarily blinded.
 
If they ever looked at the used Flashcube before discarding it, subjects would have noticed the scorch marks inside, resembling the remnants of a chip-pan fire in a doll’s house. Aluminum, the element in the Flashcube that helps the magnesium combust, must be one of the key material symbols of modernity, having shaped the twentieth century through domestic and industrial advances, air power and Moon landings. It is lightweight, strong, non-magnetic and resistant to corrosion. Yet aluminum’s shiny utopia has a dark side. Aluminum is a neurotoxin that, when ingested, may cause Alzheimer’s.* That an object designed to capture memories is contrived from a substance that corrodes memories speaks of both alchemy and irony. Aluminum in its raw form is contrived from bauxite, an amorphous clayey rock whose strip-mining extraction requires the removal of all native vegetation in the surrounding area, the destruction of habitat and food for local wildlife, with soil erosion and river pollution thrown in. Since they first opened, bauxite mines have fueled resource disputes in Africa, India and the Caribbean, and have elicited both the greed and the wrath of multinational corporations. Aluminum embodies the carcinogenic contradiction of our time: that affordable, playful and convenient consumerism is non-degradable toxic waste in waiting. Perhaps this is the reality that the spent Flashcube illuminates best.
 
None of this was on the register of consumers at the time, of course. They simply wanted a flash that wouldn’t die after being fired only once. The solution was in fact being developed as early as 1931, thirty years before the Flashcube, by Harold Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering. His Electronic Flash, a battery-powered device able to carry its own energy supply and integrated into the camera body, began to dominate the consumer market in the late 1960s. It was perfectly suited to several uses without the detriment of detritus, and quickly deposed the Flashcube as the device of choice for capturing domestic interiors. Consequently, the Flashcube’s principal manufacturer, the Kodak subsidiary Sylvania Electric Products, ceased producing it in the 1970s. As a leading contractor for warfare research and other forms of surveillance, the company returned to its main product lines, principally, avionics systems for observation helicopters, and personal distress radios for downed pilots.
 
Despite the closed production line, is it disingenuous to claim that Flashcubes are extinct? What about the familial memories they captured? As Sherry Turkle observes, “we consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences … [but] are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or provocations to thought.”  A Flashcube’s aluminum filament takes one hundred years to decompose, and its plastic casing up to a thousand. However, the photographic prints it produced will degrade within half a century, making the interior, familial memories that the Flashcube helped to capture far more susceptible to disposability than the object used to create them. Consequently the Flashcube’s simple provocation reveals that vanity and violence are essential accompaniments to un-disposability. It might have fallen out of use, but the abandoned and slowly degrading Flashcube acts as a dimly pulsating warning light, reminding us that the objects we design to indulge our narcissistic fumbling towards immortality only serve to end our life, rather than extend it.
 
Reprinted with permission from Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, edited by Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner, and Miranda Critchley (Reaktion Books, $40.00, available from the University of Chicago Press).
 
The Obsolete Object That Gave Every Boomer a Case of Redeye :  How the Flashcube changed domestic photography. By Harriet Harriss . Slate Magazine, December 21, 2021. 

 

“Clap on, clap off, it’s The Clapper!” Rarely has an advertising catchphrase been more inane or yet more precise about an object’s function. The Clapper, marketed from the mid-1980s by the American businessman Joe Pedott, is a sound-activated switch that turns appliances on and off with a clap of the hands. Plugging directly into a power socket, it looks like a double adaptor. Two appliances can be plugged into it, each controlled by a different sequence of claps that are programmed into the device. The Clapper’s selling point was convenience. Without moving from your lounge chair or bed you could turn on the television or turn off the light; returning home in the dark, all you had to do was clap for illumination. The Clapper also came with a security feature. In “away” mode, it would switch on a light at any sound, then switch it off and reset itself a few moments later. The Clapper reduced a domestic command to its pure, performative moment: the clap that demands immediate action. Such an act would have been cringeworthy if it hadn’t been couched in the camp humor that pervaded The Clapper’s marketing.
 
Now that we converse with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, and adjust just about anything in our homes remotely via a smartphone, The Clapper’s claims to convenience seem quaint. Yet it shouldn’t simply be seen as an outmoded novelty. As the patents registering its design reveal, it is part of a chain of innovation in automation and sensing technology that has culminated in today’s smart home. Its first patent, filed in 1985, was for a “Sound activated light switch,” its claim being simply for “the ornamental design,” that is, the outward appearance of the switch. This device was originally known as “The Great American Turn On,” its inventors having engaged Pedott to help market it. When he discovered that the switch didn’t really work— it had a tendency to short-circuit television sets plugged into it—Pedott bought the rights to it and hired an engineer to redesign its inner workings.
 
A second patent, filed in 1993, was for a “Method and apparatus for activating switches in response to different acoustic signals,” and includes a flow diagram that describes how The Clapper’s sensing and switching technology works.  In investigating a patent’s claim, assessors research the “prior art,” that is, how it relates to other patents filed for similar or related inventions. Eleven other patents are cited in connection to the second Clapper patent, including a “Wheelchair-mounted control apparatus” filed by New York University in 1978, a “Voice-controlled welding system” from 1979, and a “Method and device for voice-controlled operation of a telecommunications terminal” from 1986. Record is also kept of subsequent patents citing the patent in question. There are currently 89 patents citing The Clapper’s second patent, including an “Intrinsic console with positionable programmable multi-function multi-position controllers” filed by the Canadian Space Agency in 1998, a “Sound-actuated system for encouraging good personal hygiene in toilet facilities” from 2001, “Audible sound detection control circuits for toys and other amusement devices” filed by Mattel in 2003, a raft of patents filed by Skybell Technologies in relation to doorbells, and—perhaps most interesting of all—”Forming computer system networks based on acoustic signals” filed by Apple in 2014.
 
Such a set of associated patents upends regular understanding of innovation and technological development. Automated wheelchairs link to industrial machines, mechanized toys, space technology, doorbells and Apple’s advancement of the Internet of Things, all via a sound-activated switch marketed as a novelty. The ability to link this assortment of inventions is the genius of a patent system built on the double condition of disclosure and protection. Protection grants a license for exclusive use; disclosure allows the invention to be made public, enabling the differentiation and protection of further inventions and applications. Particular objects may become extinct, but patterns of invention continue along branching paths.
 
In the particular anonymous history its patent traces, The Clapper marks a critical threshold. It is the point at which we can distinguish the branching trajectory of “intelligence” in objects. In however primitive a way, The Clapper allowed us to feel as though we were communicating with objects. But the clap was a unidirectional command. Now Alexa and company talk back. They listen and remember, storing our requests as data from which an evermore sophisticated picture of preferences and behavior can be built. Apple’s acoustic network patent from 2014, which discloses “the establishment of data communications between devices based through the use of acoustic signals,” indicates how the tables have been turned: the clap has developed into the code of machine interaction.  What was once the language of our command is today the conduit for the distribution of our data.
 
Now an object of retro-kitsch fascination, The Clapper is still marketed by Pedott’s company Joseph Enterprises, Inc., the latest being a Star Wars Darth Vader version that delivers portentous aphorisms about the use of the Force when switching things on and off. Despite this, it is clear the device is functionally extinct as a result of the subsequent inventions to which it is linked. Emerging in the heyday of television marketing, it now has virtually no presence on social media. It comes from a time before the data threshold. It is just an enhanced switch, not a device that gathers and shares information. It doesn’t talk to other devices, except, now, in the voice of Darth Vader’s faux villainy. Yet, up against Alexa’s guile, perhaps such a camp portent should register as critique. Do we indeed underestimate the dark side of home automation?
 
Reprinted with permission from Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, edited by Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner & Miranda Critchley (Reaktion Books, $40.00, available from The University of Chicago Press).
 
 
The Clapper Was a Joke. Alexa Is Having the Last Laugh.  How “clap on, clap off” begat the smart homes of today. By Chales Rice. Slate Magazine, December 21, 2021. 

The University of Chicago Press

Adrian Forty, Barbara Penner & Olivia Horsfall Turner, present the book Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, which they have co-edited with Miranda Critchley.  They are joined by the authors of five of the eighty-five short essays that feature in the book, each of which addresses a different obsolete object.  Jacob Paskins presents Paris's pneumatic postal delivery system, Gillian Darley discusses the North Bucks monorail, Tim Anstey remembers the domestic serving hatch, Mark Morris talks about Fisher Price toys and Cath Slessor pays tribute to the ashtray.  Extinct:  A Compendium of Obsolete Objects is published by Reaktion Books.

 Architecture Foundation ,  November 25, 2021. 

Extinct – A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, is the sort of publication that makes you feel old. It’s not those now-discarded but once bright ideas from the distant past that are the problem but rather those still in living memory – the paper airline ticket, Letraset, fountain pens, ashtrays and of course the SinclairC5 that have passed into obsolescence. Can it be that long before those of us who remember them do too?
 
That happy thought aside, this new book from Reaktion is a delight to peruse. Rather than mocking the failed, superseded or outmoded, it is more of a celebration of 85 extinct objects and the visions that drove them, as nominated by a range of historians, curators, architects, academics and artists.
 
The four editors set the scene for these nominations with an introduction examining the nature of what constitutes extinct, along the way discussing ideas around natural selection, progress, technological innovation and consumerism. They are drawn to the cast-offs and dead ends, the short-live and misguided –what they refer to as ‘the underside of progress: the conflicts, obsolescence, accidents, destruction and failures that are an integral part of modernisation’. Coming up with six categories of extinction – failed, superseded, enforced, defunct, aestivated and visionary – they observe that few were ever entirely extinct but were merely dormant and awaiting reinvention in another form or place, or perhaps preserved by heritage organisations.
 
The featured objects are a wonderful selection. Some are absurd – the hoax Edison’s Anti-gravitation Under-clothing promised to enable the wearer to fly around the room while the Scaphander (man-boat) was a bodysuit proposed in earnest in the 18th century as an upright alternative to swimming. Some were deadly, such as Arsenic wallpaper popular in Victorian times and Asbestos-cement Rondavel housing built in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century.  Others are serious visions for infrastructure, such as the high pressure water mains which served London for nearly a century, a Pneumatic Postal System, and Cybersyn, an ambitious Chilean information system from 1970-3 to give centralised control by connecting all state companies and industries.
 
Many contributors have nominated superseded consumer items or technology. Former Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic chose the ‘beautiful and entirely contemporary-looking’ Polaroid SC-70 while Tony Fretton nominated the Rotring, Letratone and MiniCAD of the pre-digital architectural office. Shahed Saleem, design studio leader at the University of Westminster School of Architecture, nominated the Minitel, which was, he notes, ‘a French Internet before the Internet as we know it today’. Obsolete domestic items include the telephone table, the integrated radio/tv cabinet and the serving hatch.
 
Extinct architectural objects featured include the All-plastic House which reached its peak in the 1950s and early 60s, most famously with the Futuro house by Matti Suuronen and the House of the Future designed by architects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s also Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, a factory-made kit-house which attracted thousands of orders but only two were produced, and the Space Frame structural system. Gillian Darley’s account of the visionary North Bucks Monorail City proposed in the 1960s makes for fascinating reading.
 
It’s certainly food for thought – how many of the items we use daily today will one day have a similar fate? In Station Eleven, the prescient novel by Emily St John Mandel about a global pandemic, some of the survivors put together a Museum of Civilisation populated by redundant exhibits such as a credit card, a games console and a mobile phone, all rendered irreversibly obsolete. They’d surely all make it into a future version of Extinct – but what will replace them is far harder to predict.
 
Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, edited by Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner, Miranda Critchley, Reaktion Books
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
‘No Nonsense’ Fountain Pen: Pippo Ciorra, architect, academic and senior curator at MAXXI, Rome
 
Produced by Sheaffer from 1969 to 1991, the ‘No Nonsense’ Fountain Pen was, says Pippo Ciorra, a low-cost favourite of architects and architectural students in North America and Italy in particular as a single tool for both writing and sketching. He says its modernist/deco look perfectly fitted the early post-modernist inclination of the time. Chiming with the movement’s emphasis on the supremacy of the drawing, the pen, says Ciorra, ‘was both a manifesto and a weapon, ready to be unsheathed at any moment’.
 

 
Atmospheric Railway: Niall McLaughlin, founder of Niall McLaughlin Architects
 
According to Niall McLaughlin, the idea back in the 1830s to create a railway driven by atmospheric propulsion that removed the need for a locomotive was a ‘beautiful solution’ that may simply have come at the wrong time.  The first attempt, in Dalkey near Dublin, reached 30mph and was witnessed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who linked up with the patent holder on a version for public use in Devon in 1848. Beset by technical difficulties, it proved to be a short-lived, and the costliest failure of Brunel’s career.
 

 
 
Slide Rule: Adrian Forty, co-editor of Extinct and professor emeritus of architectural history at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
 
Invented around 1630 by mathematician William Oughtred, the slide rule was to become the principal means of calculating most mathematical problems until its extinction in the 1970s. According to Forty, around 40 million were manufactured globally in its final century. Its nemesis was the pocket calculator, more accurate and with the extra appeal of being able to perform simple addition and subtraction.
 
 
Flashcube: Harriet Harriss, dean of the Pratt School of Architecture, New York
 
Developed by Eastman Kodak in 1965, the Flashcube made interior photography possible for the masses, says Harriet Harriss, and was particularly positioned ‘as a feminine technology to capture home life’.
 
‘In the Flashcubes’ dazzling light, families staged domestic tableaux in an effort to display their nuclear family credentials,’ she says. Production ceased in the 1970s following the development of the electronic flash. Harriss notes that while the prints it created will degrade within half a century, the cube itself and its casing will take up to 1000 years.

All our yesterdays: a wander through extinct ideas.  Do you remember serving hatches and ashtrays, fountain pens and slide rules? A new book Extinct – A Compendium of Obsolete Objects celebrates ideas that have done their time. By Pamela Buxton. The RIBA Journal November 18, 2021.

“My mother possessed a su[perlatice ashtray”,  writes architecture critic Catherine Slessor. It had a waist-high stand and a chrome-plated bowl, and, she writes, “faintly reeking, it stood to attention in our 1960s suburban living room like some engorged trophy.” Slessor goes on to describe other ashtrays of note: a Limoges porcelain limited-edition ashtray that Salvador Dalí designed for use on Air India, in exchange for a baby elephant that the airline transported for him from Bangalore to Spain; the ashtrays at Quaglino’s in London that reportedly used to disappear at a rate of seven per day in the 1990s, snatched by diners as souvenirs of a society locale. In doing so, she conjures the material world of the twentieth century, inhabited as it was by ashtrays of all shapes and sizes. Then, with the dawn of the millennium, this category of object—part functional décor, part objet d’art—all but disappeared.
 
Slessor’s short essay on the ashtray appears in the new book Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, a collection of illustrated essays on eighty-five objects that, its editors write, “once populated the world and do so no longer.” To skim its table of contents is to encounter a wide-ranging catalog of lost things: all-plastic houses, cab fare maps, chatelaines, flying boats, moon towers, paper dresses, slide rules, UV-radiated artificial beaches, zeppelins. It is pointedly open-ended, inclusive of infrastructure and architecture as well as personal effects. The only unifying criterion is what its editors term “extinction,” in a self-conscious nod to Darwin-inflected evolutionary theories of technological innovation. “When things disappear, they do so, it is implied, because of their own inadequacy or their unsuitedness to their conditions. Part of the purpose of this book is to probe and question this seeming inevitability,” they write in the introduction. The word “extinct” also connotes something else, more poignant than “obsolescent”: a nod to the kind of death that can happen to our things. It is a loss more profound than many of our words for it—waste, breakage, consumption, discarding—convey. Extinct takes these material losses seriously and tries to quantify the social effects wrought by the wholesale disappearance of particular objects.
 
The essays in Extinct often answer two questions: What was it that has disappeared and why? And then, what was the significance of this loss? Some, like Slessor’s, are lucidly personal meditations, stuffed with anecdotes and design history; others are more technical treatises on the reason a particular technology failed to take root. The editors identify six general reasons why things become extinct and categorize each object in this way. Certain objects are deemed “failed”; they simply didn’t work. Many more, though, are “superseded” by more advanced models of similar things. Some dead objects, especially commercial products, are “defunct”—these have failed to gain widespread adoption, or couldn’t be mass-produced, or have simply gone out of style. Others are “aestivated,” meaning that they disappear but are revived in a new form. Still others are classified as “visionary,” in that they never quite came into being at all. The rest are “enforced,” basically regulated into disappearance.
 
Ashtrays fall into this last category. They have largely vanished, at least in the West, in the wake of indoor smoking bans and the decline of smoking in general. Though their disappearance might have seemed sudden, it was the culmination of long-term litigation, public health campaigns, and the slow process of local government action. None of this was aimed at the ashtray itself, but it does go to show how shifts in behavior and social mores affect the material world and vice versa. Ashtrays still exist, of course; some are still in use, and others have taken on a second life as mementos of a bygone era. But even those still circulating have a different aura than they once did, Slessor argues. Ashtrays are no longer status symbols, displayed waist-high in suburban living rooms. Now, there is something illicit about possessing an ashtray, associated as it is with the mild rebellion of smoking cigarettes. She writes, “The ashtray is not only an adjunct to social pleasure, but a memento mori, a reminder that you are dancing with death.”
 
Not all the essays in Extinct are inflected with nostalgia. Some things should have died sooner. Arsenic was widely used in paint pigments in the nineteenth century, especially in vivid greens, and incorporated into wallpaper by designers like William Morris. “Almost every wallpaper design from the early and mid-Victorian period was liberally laced with poison,” writes Lucinda Hawksley. People began dying from mysterious ailments, but even when arsenic poisoning was identified as the source, both designers and the public refused to believe it or to give up their arsenical greens. Journalists campaigned to expose the health problems in wallpaper factories and the risks of arsenic in paint, an effort that Morris privately compared to the Salem witch hunts. No legislation was ever passed to prevent the sale of arsenic wallpaper in the UK, but eventually the tide of public opinion turned, and even Morris was forced to announce in 1875 that his wallpapers were now arsenic-free.
 
There are lessons embedded in histories like this, or at least one can read them instructively. The story of arsenic wallpaper demonstrates the power of consumer desire even in the face of known risks, the failure of legislative bodies to care for the public welfare, and the hidden dangers that can lurk inside beautiful things. There are many other fables in Extinct, often pointing toward the way the market fails to advance revolutionary inventions. An electric car made almost entirely of recycled materials, introduced in the late 1990s in Norway, included design modifications like unpainted matte plastic body panels that may have been too significant for the average driver; though it was more sustainable than comparable models, it failed to attract consumers. Phase-change chemical heat-storage barrels, a radical form of solar heating invented in the 1940s, might have made for environmentally friendly home design, had they been pursued for longer. A planned monorail city in the UK that was never built looks like the utopian dream of living car-free. But alas.
 
Counterfactuality is built into many of these histories, which often yearn to know, if they don’t outright ask: What if these objects had survived? What might that alternative world be like? This idea of a parallel material universe, in which some of our problems are solved by the mere existence different objects, is tantalizing. At the end of the introduction, the editors write that “ultimately, every extinct object embodies a vision of the future, a vision that, even if the object itself has been superseded, is still in some way available to us.” This is true in a sense; people interested in internet reform can study the template the Minitel provided for early network-based computing, one which was more centralized, more widely accessible, and more attuned to privacy than the world wide web that replaced it. At the very least, Extinct is evidence that nothing is inevitable; things didn’t have to turn out this way, and things can be designed differently, keeping past failures in mind.
 
But there are limitations to the idea that every object contains a possible future rather than a record of the forces of change that surround it. These forces are omnipresent in Extinct, enumerated in many of the short essays. Certain ones crop up repeatedly: the oil crisis in the 1970s; growing concerns about sanitation in the late nineteenth century and public safety in consumer goods in the twentieth. These are fundamentally political pheneomena, with implications that go far beyond the fate of single objects. But they appear individually and sequentially, as interludes in the life cycles of particular things; the book’s structure occludes a more coherent political analysis of change. “Object lessons” are compelling—they have spawned a whole cottage industry of writing, including a series of books from Bloomsbury—but they are inherently narrow. Reading so many in a row can feel like peering at the history of design through the eyes of dozens of needles. One of the problems with Extinct is how it’s arranged; the objects appear alphabetically, seemingly at random, so it’s harder to read for throughlines. Organizing by straightforward chronology, or even by the stated categories of extinction, might have allowed for more widening from a single object out into the world. As it stands, the book feels more like a catalog of highly specific, disconnected objects, rather than a survey of the disappeared material world and why it is gone.
 
Extinction as a frame, divorced from a more particular set of concerns, confirms only that time marches on. As Judith Schalansky writes in her book An Inventory of Losses:
 
    “Fundamentally, every item is already waste, every building already a ruin, and all creation nothing but destruction, and the same is true of the work of all those disciplines and institutions that claim to be preserving the legacy of humanity. Even archaeology, however cautiously and soberly it may profess to probe the debris of past ages, is a form of devastation—and the archives, museums, and libraries, the zoological gardens and nature reserves are nothing more than managed cemeteries whose stored specimens, as often as not, have been plucked from the life cycle of the present to be stored away, allowed to be forgotten even, like those heroic events and figures whose monuments populate urban landscapes.”
 
Writing, Schalansky theorizes, is not resurrection, “but it can enable everything to be experienced.” The best essays in Extinct manage this, bringing the ashtray and the tragedy of arsenic wallpaper and the strange floodlights of streets lit by moon towers not quite to life but into the realm of our imagined experience.
 
Extinct is also a beautiful object in its own right: hardcover, with a colorful cover illustration of a cassette tape, and rich photographs and drawings that accompany the essays. Its design, in fact, calls to mind that maligned category of thing that I happen to love: “the coffee table book.” Coffee table books are often seen as lowbrow, meant to be displayed rather than read, but that’s unfair to the genre—they are meant to be picked up in moments of idleness, boredom, waiting, laziness, an alternative to sustained reading or scrolling on a smartphone. There would be some wisdom, maybe, in taking guidance from Extinct’s form, picking it up and opening it at random, sampling various chapters and skipping others, marveling at its images and learning interesting facts. (I often found myself repeating such things to friends while reading this book: “Did you know it took about four days to cross the Atlantic in a Zeppelin? Did you know the International Air Transport Association had a retirement ceremony for the paper airline ticket in 2008?”) If it resists offering any unified theories, Extinct rewards the casually curious reader, interested in things that have changed or disappeared, going from dust to dust.
 
Mementos Mori.  What else is lost when an object disappears? By Sophie Haigney. The Baffler, January 27, 2022. 

Helen Levitt : In The Street

 

You must look and look, and look again. Helen Levitt’s artwork seems to spring up from such an imperative. A pioneer of street photography, Levitt worked her entire life in the same few locations: the most crowded and poorest neighborhoods of New York. She ventured into those streets, searching for the theater of everyday life, from the 1930s through the 1990s.
 
In the Street, a retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery, brings together key works from across the nearly seven decades of the photographer’s practice. Like many, I’ve always been mesmerized by Levitt’s 1930s and ’40s photographs of children playing in the streets, her best-known works. It seems fitting that the artist, a former art teacher, would photograph children’s chalk drawings left behind on walls and sidewalks. A Way of Seeing, her most celebrated photo book, opens with such curious drawings. 
 
Spanish Harlem and the Bronx were to Levitt as Paris’s flea markets were to the Surrealists: an inexhaustible source of wonder. Though Surrealism’s influence on Levitt is still awaiting a detailed study, evidence of this connection is abundant in her work. Look at any of her photographs, and you’ll almost certainly find hints of the uncanny or grotesque. People are often captured in awkward poses and puzzling gestures, bending over in strange positions so that they appear folded in half or amorphous. Streets and house facades seem transformed into stages and sets, and everyday activities are defamiliarized. Kids are portrayed in all their vulnerability and cruelty, playing a constant game on the threshold between the familiar and the unknown.
 
Among Levitt’s favorite subjects were children dressed up for Halloween. Their little faces covered by cheap paper masks, they inhabit a world of their own, unnoticed by grown-ups, as if they were ghosts.

 
“The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theater and a battleground.” The opening words of In the Street (1948), the experimental 16-minute documentary Levitt filmed, together with Janice Loeb and James Agee, on the streets where she took her photographs, could be used to sum-up her entire oeuvre.
 
  
Quite rightly, the film is included in the exhibition to stress the importance of the artist as a filmmaker. But while I understand its relevance — it anticipates cinéma vérité by almost a decade — I resent it in the way it kills some of the mystery behind Levitt’s photos. Watching her subjects moving and acting, made alive by the film camera, places those characters back into the realm of the mundane. Between Levitt’s static and moving images there’s the same substantial difference as that between reminiscing and experiencing a present event. Memories are always much more fun, because we get to edit the facts.       

 
Moving images were of the utmost importance to Levitt, so much so that from 1948 to the late 1950s she focused solely on filmmaking. She returned to photography to embrace color, at a time when black and white was deemed high art and color was looked down upon, as it was considered too close to advertising and fashion photography.
 
I don’t agree with the assessment of some art historians that Levitt’s color photographs are less compelling than her black and white ones. So I was pleased to find an entire floor of the exhibition dedicated to this less-known body of work.
 
Things had changed between the 1940s and late ’50s. The new variables of color photography demanded a new way of approaching Levitt’s subjects. And the advent of television and air conditioning had made children’s street games vanish. Yet Levitt’s eye for idiosyncrasies had remained the same. Color steps in to reinforce her penchant for singularity.
 
This is apparent in “New York City (Phone Booth)” (1980), a photograph of two kids squeezed in a phone booth dominated by a corpulent woman, or in “New York” (1980), of a little girl whose body seems impossibly contorted as she crouches between the curb and the back end of a green car.

 
Streets are, indeed, a theater and a battleground. You only have to look and look, and look again.
 
Helen Levitt: In The Streets continues at the Photographers’ Gallery (16-18 Ramillies Street, London, England) through February 13. The exhibition was curated by Walter Moser in collaboration with the Photographers’ Gallery Senior Curator Anna Dannemann.
 
A Photographer’s Portrait of the Theater of the Streets. By Franceso Dama. Hyperallergic, January 23, 2022

A retrospective of the US street photographer overturns conventional wisdom about her work, revealing it as political and human, as well as demonstrating her acute eye for the unusual and telling image
 
The American poet and cultural critic David Levi Strauss memorably described Helen Levitt as “maybe the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time”. That was in 1997, when Levitt was 84 and the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography in New York, the city in which she was born and made most of her work. Just over two decades on, and 12 years after her death, aged 95, in 2009, one could argue that little has changed in terms of her enigmatic status.
 
In a few weeks’ time, though, a more radical retrospective of Levitt’s work opens at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, having garnered much attention at the Arles photography festival in 2019. Titled In the Street and curated by Walter Moser, art historian and chief curator for photography at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, it suggests that almost everything you know about Helen Levitt, if indeed you know her at all, is wrong.
 
“For too long, there had been this received notion that Levitt’s photographs are lyrical and poetic, words that are too often applied lazily to the work of female photographers,” says Moser, who has spent years researching Levitt’s archive and, in the process, discovered many previously unseen images. “The truth is that Levitt was part of a highly intellectual cultural and political milieu in New York in the 1930s and her photography reflected her deep interest in surrealism, cinema, leftwing politics and the new ideas that were then emerging about the role of the body in art.”
 
Over two floors in the Photographers’ Gallery, which, incidentally, hosted Levitt’s first European exhibition in 1988, In the Street will trace her work in photography and film over 50 years of restless, inquisitive looking. The world she observed for most of that time was defiantly local – Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem – and yet recognisably universal in its capturing of the rhythms and gestures of children’s play and adults’ social interactions or solitary reveries. It is a dramatically different world to our own, the city streets teeming with children, who play with reckless abandon on stoops, waste grounds and vacant buildings.
 
Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her interest in photography blossomed when, aged 18, and having dropped out of high school, she began working in the darkroom of a commercial portrait photographer. Five years later, she bought a secondhand 35mm camera and, in his illuminating catalogue essay for her retrospective, Duncan Forbes asks us to picture “a diminutive, determined figure striding out, daringly at first, from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn across the city, transforming herself as a modern woman through her desire to see things differently”.
 
That desire would take a few years to change itself into a singular and subtle vision of the New York streets that remains an intriguing counterpoint to the more combative images made by the mostly male practitioners who followed in her wake in the 1960s and 70s and have all but defined the term “street photography”. But on the evidence Moser has gathered from her archives, which includes previously unseen photographs, contact sheets and short films, the term “street photographer” barely does Levitt justice.
 
 “She doesn’t just charge in like many male street photographers tend to,” says Siân Davey, a British documentary photographer whose quietly observational work explores the psychology of family, self and community. “Instead, in her pictures, you sense a particular quality of contact between her and her subjects. There is tenderness and an absence of ego that tells you what kind of person she was.”
 
Although Levitt was a quiet, solitary figure on the streets of New York, she was not a detached observer: rather, Moser says, she wanted her subjects to be aware of her presence and respond to it.
 
“What is evident from close attention to her contact sheets is that people are often presenting themselves in regard to the photographer opposite them,” he says. “They are knowing participants in her photographs – looking at her, smiling at her, flirting or striking a pose for her camera, though often she crops her photographs to take out these overt acknowledgments of her presence. On one level, her photography is essentially a performative exchange and that lends it a very contemporary resonance.”

 
Initially, though, it was her exposure to the social realism of the determinedly leftwing Workers Film and Photo League that shaped her early style. Through it, she absorbed the idea that photography was an agent of social change, while never quite committing herself to the communist cause as wholeheartedly as fellow photographer Lisette Model, who would later find herself on an FBI watchlist. “I decided I should take pictures of working-class people and contribute to the movements,” Levitt later said of that time. “And then I saw pictures of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and realised that photography could be an art – and that made me ambitious.”
 
She met Cartier-Bresson in 1935, introducing herself at a talk he gave to the Film and Photo League and subsequently accompanying him on a day-long shoot despite initially being intimidated into silence by his presence. “He was an intellectual, highly educated,” she later recalled. “I was a high-school dropout.”
 
Her participation in the Film and Photo League also exposed Levitt to the work of avant garde film-makers from Europe and Russia as well as surrealist ideas and radical developments in contemporary dance that, as Forbes puts it, elevated “an aesthetics of corporeal transfiguration through movement and drama”.
 
These contrasting formal influences – the realist and the poetic – were central to Levitt’s way of seeing, both in her photography and in her later embrace of film-making. As her style matured, her photographs of children seem almost choreographed in their capturing of the gestures and glances of play. And, though often joyous, they frequently have a darker undertone: the children engage in combat games and pose as gangsters in homage to the Hollywood films of the time. In one image, a child recoils as if he has just been slapped in the face by the adult looming over him. “There is a hint of darkness in her work, but it is never overt,” says Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery. “In her photographs, she presents the street as an almost theatrical landscape where the smallest interactions and gestures are incredibly resonant.”
 
In 1938, Levitt met another toweringly influential photographer, Walker Evans, whom she also befriended. Evans introduced her to the writer James Agee, with whom she would collaborate on her book, A Way of Seeing, and several intriguing films, including In the Street and The Quiet One, a documentary about an emotionally disturbed African American child.
 
For all that, Levitt was an intensely private individual who gave very few interviews in her lifetime. We know that she lived alone in her New York apartment with a cat called Binky and that she suffered from Ménière’s disease, which causes hearing problems and dizziness. In old age, she said, perhaps only half-jokingly, “I have felt wobbly all my life”. Her work, it seemed, centred her and she pursued it with single-minded determination.
 
 “For all the research I have done, her personality is a mystery to me,” says Moser. “I just could not figure her out. She was ambitious and knew what she wanted and she was certainly not shy, but to a great degree, she hid behind her work.”

 
She also expressed herself through her photography in often bold and prescient ways as when, in 1959, she began shooting in colour. The results still startle when you see her prints for the first time, the deep tonal richness of the reds and greens adding a heightened otherness to her street tableaux. A young girl, crouching spider-like beneath the gleaming green surface of a pristine car is a study in childhood reverie amid an adult world that seems even more extravagantly unreal. Sadly, most of her colour negatives were lost when her apartment was burgled in 1970, forcing her to shoot again on the same streets with renewed intensity of purpose.
 

In her later photographs, it is the unruly energy and makeshift nature of New York that resonates, the streets becoming less playful and more crowded and combative, her images less joyous as the decades pass. “In the work she made in the 30s and 40s, she is always representing people who occupy their own space in their neighbourhoods,” says Moser, “but, by the late 1960s, and more profoundly in the 1980s, you are seeing in her images the ways in which the city has become increasingly regulated by consumerism and capitalism. This, too, of course, has a real resonance for our times.”
 
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from her first film, In the Street, which she made in 1948 in collaboration with Agee and the poet and photographer Janice Loeb. It is a short, silent, incredibly evocative flow of images from the bustling streets of Spanish Harlem in the 1940s. The first words that appear on screen are: “The streets of the poorer quarters of great cities are above all a theatre and a battleground.” That comes close to capturing the particular atmosphere of Helen Levitt’s extraordinary body of work, if not its singularly expressive power. She was, and remains, a quiet genius of 20th century photography.
 
Helen Levitt: In the Street is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1, from 15 October to 13 February 2022
 
 
Helen Levitt: the most celebrated, least known photographer of her time. By Sean O’Hagan. The Guardian, October 2, 2021. 

“In the Street” is a silent film recorded in the mid to late 1940’s that focuses on everyday life in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City. This work was created with the collaboration of Helen Levitt, the most profound photographer in New York City in her time, James Agee, an influential writer and film critic from Tennessee, and James Loeb, a former banker turned painter and photographer from New York City. Bringing together these three unique and genius minds truly makes this film so powerful. In 1952 the film was re-released with the addition of a piano soundtrack by the work of Arthur Kleiner, an Austrian composer. The piano element completely transformed the work as it becomes more engaging and gives the audience insight to the atmosphere being portrayed.
 
I was instantly drawn to this piece primarily because I am fascinated by the past. I am constantly reading historical fiction novels and with all the research I do on climate change it is evident that everything is linked to the past in its own way. When I saw this candid documentary on something as simple as recording the basic behaviors and interactions between people in the 1940’s I was immediately drawn in. Seeing how the children were able to run free around the city was something we would never see in our modern world. I wonder if this major change in society stems from the media broadcasting every horrible incident that occurs and instilling fear into the world, creating a lack of trust in humanity. It was both comforting and sad to see these children living so care-free because it is nice to know the world hasn’t always been so anxiety ridden and hectic, but at the same time, it is incredibly remorseful to see something so beautiful lost.
 
UbuWeb Film & Video: Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb & James Agee - In the Street (1948/1952)
 
In the Street Directed by Helen Levitt US 1948/1952, 16mm, b/w, sound (piano performance by Arthur Kleiner), 16 min.
 
“In The Street 1948/1952” Directed By Helen Levitt. By Emily Milano. Medium, September 21, 2021.

 

In the Street

This lyrical, slice-of-life documentary (by Helen Levitt, James Agee and Janice Loeb) about East Harlem is one of several outstanding children's documentaries ("The Quiet One" and "Louisiana Story," among others) produced immediately after World War II. The filmmakers captured the energy-filled streets as part theater, part battleground and part playground. In their everyday lives and actions, people project an image of human existence against the turmoil of the street. Named to the National Film Registry in 2006
 
Library of Congress. December 11, 2017. 

The must-see exhibition of the Festival d’Arles, is a retrospective devoted to the work of Helen Levitt which promises to take us into the heart of the American photographer’s work. The exhibition’s curator, Walter Moser, comments on six selected photographs.

 
 
" This is one of Helen Levitt‘s last and at the same time strongest photograph. “Spider-Girl” shows aspects of both her late color work as well as her early black and white photographs from the 1930s and 40s. It was in the 1950s and then again 20 years later when Levitt following a career in film turned yet again to photography and started working in color. The technical parameters of shooting and the urban landscape of New York had changed: Children, once her favorite topic, had disappeared from the streets and been replaced by cars and elderly people on sidewalks, who now dominated her photographs. When children appeared in the pictures they were crammed into tight spaces. Here the girl is squeezes in between a car and the sidewalk. Due to the long exposure time of color film Levitt started to compose her pictures differently. They are less dynamic, yet working with contrasts in color permitted her to create new layers of meaning and spatial situations. The girl’s pose with an obscured face and solely typified by her twisted extremities is echoing Levitt’s surrealistic sensibility of the 1930s and 40s. In her early black and white photographs Levitt frequently showed passersby in strange poses that gave them an alienated and uncanny appearance, breaking with cultural norms regarding depictions of the body. These “grotesque” and subversive representations found their way into Levitt’s works not only through Surrealism, but also through silent and slapstick cinema. "
 
 
 

  
" The silent film influenced Helen Levitt’s way of representing dynamic bodies and expressive gestures decisively. The artist had been an enthusiastic moviegoer since her youth, enjoying the likes of Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy, admiring Charlie Chaplin most of all. Their forms of expression were discussed widely in artist circles of the 1930s and 1940s like the Film and Photo League. Whereas Chaplin and Keaton had relied on exalted gestures, the sound film, gaining popularity in the mid-1930s, entailed a change in acting. Gestures became increasingly restrained and were subordinated to the spoken word. Regarded critically this development again made the silent film an important point of reference for photographers and filmmakers (for example Jean Vigo and Jean Cocteau) who treasured its wider range of visual expression in its expressive bodily representations. Levitt reformulates Charlie Chaplin’s typical way of interacting with objects. Chaplin frequently modified the original function of objects for the sake of the joke. Levitt employed this approach in the picture of a woman, who bends down into a stroller, which in turn appears to swallow her upper body. Like in Chaplin films the objects determine the protagonist’s gestures. The form of the flower in the photograph of the grim looking girl repeats and emphasize her expressively outspread fingers. "
 
 

 
 
" It is often said that Helen Levitt worked with an angle finder–a device which enabled her to photograph people without their knowledge. In my opinion this notion is over-emphasized. For example in the photographs of two smoking boys or a group of four men, the subjects seem unaware of the photographer. Comparing these pictures with the negatives, and seeing other, unpublished variants, it becomes apparent that the people are interacting with Levitt, at times looking or laughing into the camera. In the former photograph Levitt obscured this aspect by cropping a third person, who looked directly into the camera thus revealing the interaction as such. Levitt didn’t stage the people but very often the subjects in the pictures performed and posed being fully aware of the photographer. "
 

  
 
" By 1935 at the latest, Levitt came in touch with the Surrealist movement through Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work. Photographers discovered the urban spaces, where they found paradoxical, enigmatic and humorous elements in their everyday surroundings, when seemingly aimlessly walking the streets. Levitts photographs are based on an ethnographical approach: She rendered children in Halloween costumes and masks as eerie actors of a magic ritual. It strikes one as no mere coincidence that masks were central objects in the context of primitive art, which at the time could regularly be seen in exhibitions, for example in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Also the French magazine Documents, founded by the Surrealist group around Georges Bataille, is a key influence for the surrealist field-research. Documents shows ethnographic documentation of masks from the British museum or cover designs of the famous serial novel Fantômas, thus combining examples from high and pop culture. "
 

Arles Festival 2019 : Helen Levitt as seen by Walter Moser. By Jean-baptiste Gauvin.  Blind Magazine. July 4, 2019

 

New York City’s doorways, storefronts and cascading fire escapes were the grand backdrop to Helen Levitt’s photos. In the Lower East Side and Harlem, children pretended to be bride and groom, wore masks for Halloween or drew with chalk on the sidewalk. The lyricism of her work led her to be called the city’s visual poet laureate, supposedly an apolitical, black-and-white photographer of the everyday.

 
“Helen Levitt is often described as a lyrical and poetic photographer and in my opinion, that is very often the description for female photographers or women artists,” said Walter Moser, the curator of a new retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna. The exhibit challenges the prevailing, romantic narrative found in essays and critiques done mostly by men. The first culprit — perhaps unintentionally — was the writer James Agee, whom Ms. Levitt met through her mentor, Walker Evans. In an essay that later became the introduction to her book “A Way of Seeing,” he wrote in 1946 that “at least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work I know.”
 
But that praise also obscured her intent. “Scholars say that Helen Levitt wasn’t political at all, and I think that is actually not true, because she was part of highly intellectual circles,” Mr. Moser said. Ms. Levitt said as much in an interview with National Public Radio. “I decided I should take pictures of working class people and contribute to the movements,” she said. “Whatever movements there were — Socialism, Communism, whatever was happening.”
 
What was happening was the Depression. The Farm Security Administration, a New Deal project created in 1937, had been sending photographers like Mr. Evans to document rural poverty. Their images promoted recovery programs for farmers and were probably the most comprehensive visual survey to date of the people, culture and places of rural America.
 
At the time, New York was abuzz with leftist activism. The Communist Party U.S.A. (a name that varied) had just moved its headquarters from Chicago to Union Square. Many Eastern European Jews were active in the movement, including photographers. Ms. Levitt, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish immigrant, was influenced by the Photo League and its leader, Sid Grossman, who urged members to photograph with a social awareness. Ms. Levitt reflected that concern, capturing children’s battle games that echoed World War II.
 
Another myth is that she relied on a right-angled viewfinder, supposedly to stealthily photograph her subjects. But contact sheets in the exhibit’s catalog show different stages of her interactions with her subjects, including when they stared right into her lens. The final chosen image was often one that seemed most candid.
 
“Levitt actually very often selected a picture where apparently the photographed people are not aware of the photographer,” Mr. Moser said. “But, when you compare these selected images with the other variants, or the negative strip, or the contact sheet, it becomes clear that very often the people knew about the photographer.”
 
Ms. Levitt was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, in 1913. She worked for a commercial photographer in the Bronx where, for six dollars a week, she learned darkroom basics. But a 1935 exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery led her to discover the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom she would later meet, and Mr. Evans, to whom she showed her photos of children. Mr. Evans and Ms. Levitt later collaborated most famously on their subway photographs.
 
 Taking an interest in film, she became a full-time film editor and director. By the 1950s had made a second career out of her films, one of which was a collaboration with James Agee, and had been nominated for an Academy Award. She returned to photography in 1959 after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship for her street scenes, but this time in color.
 
In fact, Ms. Levitt was a pioneer of color photography. But again, she was upstaged by men. Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston have always been hailed as the pioneers of fine-art color photography, but Ms. Levitt had her exhibition of color work at the Museum of Modern Art some two years before Mr. Eggleston.
 
“When you think about Walker Evans or Henri Cartier-Bresson, they’re all really famous and Helen Levitt is not,” Mr. Moser said. “And of course, that’s also how art history is written. Very often women photographers or women artists are overlooked, and that’s a thing that we wanted to correct.”
 
Helen Levitt’s Street Photos Blend the Poetic With the Political. By Rena Silverman. The New York Times, January 16, 2019

 

Helen Levitt found magic on the grimy streets of New York. Her photographs from the '30s and '40s capture the grit and vigor and humor of the city. And she kept on shooting for much of her life.

 
Helen Levitt died in her sleep over the weekend. She was 95.
 
Late in 2001, I visited her in her small, well-worn Greenwich Village apartment for a story about her life and career.
 
And it was probably one of the toughest interviews I've ever done. It quickly became clear she didn't much like talking about her work. I tried asking about one of her best-known images — a black and white picture of four young girls watching soap bubbles drift across the street. I asked her what she captured in that picture.
 
"Just what you see," Levitt said.
 
I asked her why it was hard to talk about her photography.
 
"If it were easy to talk about, I'd be a writer," she said. "Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images."
 
And I asked if she was happy with the picture when she looked at it, if it gave her pleasure.
 
"Yeah," she said. "I think it's a nice picture."
 
Levitt was charming, though, in her own tough way, living with her yellow tabby cat, Binky, up four flights of stairs.
 
She told me, briefly, about meeting the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and learning from him that a picture didn't have to have social meaning — that it could "stand up by itself."
 
Capturing Small, Perfect Moments
 
And she talked some about walking around the streets of New York and how she could capture those moments unnoticed.
 
"I had attached to my camera — I had a little device that fit on the Leica camera that they called a winkelsucher, which meant that you could look one way and take the picture the other," she said. "You could turn your camera sideways."
 
They were small, perfect moments that she found, though she would never tell you that.
 
In a photo from circa 1940, some street urchins in tattered clothes cluster on the sidewalk. They're holding the frame of a broken mirror, a boy on a bicycle framed exactly in that open space.
 
In one of my favorites, we see just the back and legs of a woman. She has dived up to her shoulders into her son's baby carriage, as he laughs in huge delight.
 
This was a time when life was lived on the streets, and that's where Levitt spent her time — especially in Spanish Harlem.
 
"It was a very good neighborhood for taking pictures in those days, because that was before television," she said. "There was a lot happening. And then the older people would sometimes be sitting out on the stoops because of the heat. They didn't have air conditioning in those days. It was, don't forget, in the late '30s. So those neighborhoods were very active."
 
When I was in her apartment, I saw boxes of prints stacked up. One was labeled simply "nothing good." Another one was marked "here and there."
 
"That's the beginning of another book," she said about the box.
 
"Can I take a peek?" I asked.
 
"Nope," she said. "'Cause I'm unsure about it. If I was sure that they were worth anything, I'd show it to you. But I can't."
 
Well, she must have decided they were worth something. That book, Here and There, came out a few years later.
 
One Last Visit
 
About a year after my first visit, I went back to see Levitt one more time.
 
I was moving away from New York, and I wanted to bring a piece of the city with me. She let me look through some boxes of prints, and the one I bought from her that day hangs on my living room wall.
 
It shows two young children on the street, of course — not the sidewalk. They're in the middle of the street, and they're dancing. A white girl, in bright white shoes and a summer dress, her arms raised up — maybe she's about to twirl — turns toward a black boy, smaller, in shorts, with one arm curved joyfully over his head.
 
I'm sure they had no idea Levitt was there.

Helen Levitt Captured Perfect Moments, Unnoticed. By Melissa Block. NPR, March 30, 2009.

Helen Levitt's Indelible Eye
 
Helen Levitt is considered "a photographer's photographer" — little known by the public, but revered by fellow photographers. She has a new book of her photos documenting New York City street scenes, and talks about her life with All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block.

NPR. January 17, 2002.