Looking up: The child and the city

Abstract

This article examines the work of four documentary photographers: Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt, Walter Rosenblum and Jerome Liebling. During the late-1930s and 1940s, they photographed, in unique ways, the children and adolescents living in New York City. Their distinctive forms of street photography explore a subterrain of attitudes about child behaviour in an urban environment. The study is based upon interviews conducted by the author and a close examination of the work of the photographers.