Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt (born August 31, 1913, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died March 29, 2009, New York) was an American street photographer and filmmaker whose work captures the bustle, squalor, and beauty of everyday life in New York City.

Levitt began her career in photography at age 18 working in a portrait studio in the Bronx. After seeing the works of French photographer Henri-Cartier Bresson, she was inspired to purchase a 35-mm Leica camera and began to scour the poor neighbourhoods of her native New York for subject matter. About 1938 she took her portfolio to photographer Walker Evans’s studio, where she also met novelist and film critic James Agee, who had collaborated with Evans on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). She struck up friendships with the two men, occasionally accompanying the former on his photo shoots in the city.

During this period Levitt often chose children, especially the underprivileged, as her subject matter. Her first show, “Photographs of Children,” was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943 and featured the humanity that infuses much of her work. Included in this show were photographs from her visit in 1941 to Mexico City, where she photographed the city’s street life. Agee wrote the introduction to Levitt’s book of photographs entitled A Way of Seeing: Photographs of New York, which she compiled in the late 1940s. (The book was not published until 1965, 10 years after Agee’s death.) In it, he praised Levitt’s photographs, finding them “as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying and enduring as any lyrical work that I know.”

In the mid-1940s Levitt collaborated with Agee, filmmaker Sidney Meyers, and painter Janice Loeb on The Quiet One, a prizewinning documentary about a young African American boy, and with Agee and Loeb on the film In the Street, which captures everyday life in East Harlem. For the next decade she concentrated on film editing and directing. In 1959 and 1960 she received Guggenheim Fellowships to investigate techniques using colour photography. The slides that resulted from the project, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963, were stolen from her apartment before they could be duplicated. Levitt focused for the rest of the 1960s on film work and resumed photography in the 1970s, with a major Museum of Modern Art show in 1974.

There are several books of Levitt’s photography, including In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938–1948 (1987), Mexico City (1997), Crosstown (2001), Slide Show (2005), and Helen Levitt (2008).