Across sidewalks, walls and city streets, children leave behind fleeting traces of imagination: chalk drawings, handwritten messages, names, declarations of affection, insults, fantasies and invented worlds. These spontaneous inscriptions transform the urban landscape into a temporary surface of expression, continually erased and renewed by time and weather.

Between 1938 and 1948, Helen Levitt photographed these fragile interventions throughout New York, creating an extraordinary visual record of childhood creativity and street life. Gathered here are more than one hundred photographs, many previously unpublished, carefully selected and sequenced by the photographer herself.

The images capture a moment when children occupied public space with an instinctive visual freedom, marking the city through games, sketches, words and symbols. Ships, monsters, houses, heroes and fragments of conversations emerge across walls and pavements, revealing a world shaped by imagination and collective play.

Accompanied by a text reflecting on the imaginative life of children, the publication also evokes a vanished urban atmosphere in which drawing, wandering and invention were deeply embedded in everyday experience. The photographs function both as historical documents and as timeless observations of childhood’s impulse to picture, narrate and claim the world through images.