Rebecca Lepkoff
Three major tendencies in the history of photography–the photo as portrait, social document, and autonomous art object–are all held in splendid balance in Rebecca Lepkoff’s 18 vintage prints now at Stephen Daiter, her first one-person show in Chicago. She’s been interested in photography since the 1930s and has documented principally the neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where she grew up. Daily, (Banana Cart), 1940’s shows a street from a second-story window. Its combination of a pushcart, two baby carriages, and a mound of trash shows Lepkoff’s sensitivity to the street’s mix of hope and decrepitude, but the photo is also striking as a composition. The dynamic range provided by the bricks of the buildings, the various shades of gray, and the black shadows creates a rich set of contrasts–these are the normal tones of a photographic print, yet it seems almost as if the image is forming before one’s eyes. This image is all the more extraordinary because though she’d been given informal instruction by her then boyfriend, photographer Arnold Eagle, Lepkoff hadn’t taken any photography classes at the time she made this picture.
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Lower East Side, (Children Playing in Street, Little Girl in Box), 1940’s includes five kids in different poses, none of their faces clearly visible. It recalls the multicharacter compositions of Helen Levitt–whose work, along with Walker Evans’s, Lepkoff particularly admires–though it has none of her lyricism. In Levitt the kids’ positions seem almost unnaturally graceful; here they have the uncomfortable stoops and bends of people adrift. Most of Lepkoff’s photos are unposed, though she told me that when she took Lower East Side, NYC, (Three Boys, One Holding an Apple), 1950’s, she saw the three and “asked them to stop. But I wouldn’t wait for them to get all fixed up, so they wouldn’t get into a pose kind of thing.” Two of the three face the camera, and while their expressions are different, they’re not especially revealing–the faces throughout the exhibit rarely reveal much. But the middle boy holds a partly eaten apple, which Lepkoff places at her composition’s center as if it’s a sign of his identity.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Rebecca Lepkoff, Justine Kurland.
