Helen Levitt American, 1913-2009

Helen Levitt (1913–2009) was one of the most influential street photographers of the twentieth century. From the late 1930s, she photographed the Lower East Side, Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and the Bronx, capturing the spontaneous choreography of children at play, the chalk drawings they left on walls and stoops, and the ingenuity with which they fashioned entire worlds from the simplest materials. Levitt saw the street as a theatre and its inhabitants as performers, recording their gestures, improvisations, and fleeting encounters. As James Agee wrote, her visual vocabulary was often suggestive of, and sometimes identical with, that of the Surrealists. Taken together, the photographs form an unassuming yet irrefutable manifesto for a way of seeing—a major work of poetry achieved without pretension.

Born in Brooklyn to a Russian Jewish family, Levitt left high school before graduating and went to work for a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx. Two encounters proved decisive: seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1935, and meeting Walker Evans, for whom she worked as an assistant in 1938 and 1939. She bought her first Leica in 1936 to photograph the chalk drawings made by the children she taught in art classes.

Working with a 35mm Leica fitted with a right-angle viewfinder, Levitt could appear to look in one direction while photographing in another, allowing her to work unobtrusively. Her photographs of children’s chalk drawings, made between 1938 and 1948, constitute her first sustained body of work, produced over a decade on the same streets. Inspired in part by Cartier-Bresson’s work, she travelled to Mexico in 1941. From the late 1950s onward, she also worked extensively in color.

The Museum of Modern Art included Levitt in the inaugural exhibition of its photography department in 1939. In 1943, at the age of thirty, she was given a solo exhibition there, Children: Photographs of Helen Levitt. With James Agee and Janice Loeb, she made The Quiet One in 1948 and In the Street in 1952, the latter a pioneering street film and precursor to cinéma vérité. She subsequently worked as a film editor for twenty-five years. Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1960 supported her color photography. A Way of Seeing, a book assembled in the 1940s with an essay by Agee, was published in 1965. In 1970, the finest of her color photographs were stolen from her apartment, forcing her to begin again. The resulting work was presented at the museum in 1974 as a continuous slide projection—an early museum slide presentation and one of the first exhibitions devoted to serious color photography.

Levitt lived for most of her life in the same Greenwich Village apartment, where she died in 2009 at the age of ninety-five. Retrospectives followed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991, the International Center of Photography in 1997, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in 2007, and the Albertina and The Photographers’ Gallery in 2021. Her estate, held by Film Documents LLC, has been represented by Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne since 2019. Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.