wall drawings

The photographer Helen Levitt has long been a huge inspiration to me.

During the 1940’s, Levitt made an amazing and wondrous body of work about children at play on the streets of New York. Some of those pictures have to do with chalk and crayon drawings children made on buildings, walls and sidewalks - graffiti, if you will.

Robert Coles, in the introduction to Levitt’s monograph In the Street, wrote of these drawings:

(He begins by quoting Anna Freud.)

“‘Do not fail to see how far ahead children can see, but only some of them, and they only sometimes, and for certain reasons which it is your task to comprehend… A child who seems confined by the world can’t escape, usually – but CAN look around all possible corners; or the child can try to change the world by seeing it differently. Our eyes lend themselves to our wishes and our conflicts. We only truly notice a small amount of what is there, to be noticed – and so children, like the rest of us, pay attention to what, for one reason or another, serves their purposes.’

She would have been the last one to claim originality and sweeping significance for such remarks, and yet any discussion of children’s art – what they draw or paint on paper, on canvases, or on the walls of buildings, or with chalk on sidewalks or streets, or, yes, on the plain dirt and mud of obscure villages in distant nations – has to begin with an acknowledgement such as Anna Freud made: there are in each of us certain private reasons for noticing THIS, for summoning THAT, for wanting to see one aspect of reality given a degree of permanence and for having no such interest that another aspect of that reality should have any visual life whatsoever.”

I can never begin to come close to accomplishing what Levitt did in her body of work about children’s wall drawings, not would I even pretend to. But in a nod to her, I spent some time photographing the drawings I found on walls and chalkboards at the orphanage in Uganda. These, of course, don’t even begin to take into account the artwork the kids made on paper and canvas during art classes. These are simply quiet little expressions that I found scribbled here and there.

I will post a few over the course of the next couple of days. Enjoy… and in the meantime, go out and get yourself a copy of a Helen Levitt book if you don’t already have one. Her work is pure genius.