Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009) was an American documentary photographer.
Levitt grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Dropping out of school, she taught herself photography while working for a commercial photographer. While teaching some art classes to children in 1937, Levitt became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children’s street culture of the time. She purchased a Leica camera and began to photograph these works as well as the children who made them. The resulting photographs appeared, to great acclaim, in 1987 as In The Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City 1938–1948. Named as one of the “100 best photo-books”, first-editions are now highly collectable.

She studied with Walker Evans during 1938 and 1939. In 1943 Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art curated her first solo exhibition, after which she began to find press work as a documentary photographer. In the late 1940s she briefly became a film director, working with James Agee, with whom she shot the short art film, In the Street. In 1959 and 1960, she received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take colour photographs on the streets of New York but much of this work was stolen in a burglary. The remaining photos, and others taken in the following years, can be seen in the book Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt. Her first major book was A Way of Seeing (1965). In 1976 she was a Photography Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The work of Helen Levitt is featured in this exhibition.

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Cartier Bresson . . . . . . . In Context

The work of Helen Levitt is featured in these Theme Collections.

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Urban Landscapes – B&W

Portraiture – Female