Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt was born on August 31, 1913 and lived a successful and long life. In fact, she didn’t pass until March 29, 2009. Levitt was an American photographer who was particularly prominent for "street photography" around New York City. She was known as a common “street shooter.” Levitt grew up in Brooklyn, where she later dropped out of high school, and taught herself photography while working for a commercial photographer. While teaching classes in art to children in 1937, Levitt became fascinated with the chalk drawings that the New York City children had been drawing in the street. She purchased a Leica camera and began to photograph the city.
Helen Levitt’s photographs were not meant to tell a story. She took pictures in poor neighborhoods because the people in the street were fully sociable and visually interesting. Levitt's photos did not consist of bizarre events. Most of them show the games and excitement of children, the everyday conversations of the working class, and the observant waiting of elders. What is extraordinary about the photographs is that these events that were being captured, were usual doings of life, that were happening everywhere around the world, just maybe with minor differences.
Levitt found early success. In July 1939, the new photography section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City included Levitt's work in its initial exhibition. In Helen Levitt’s most well known picture, three suitably dressed children get ready to go trick-or-treating on Halloween in 1939. These children are standing on a stoop outside their house and are excited about the holiday. The little girl on the top step is putting on her mask, the boy near her has his mask in place and is taking a graceful step down, while another boy, who is also masked, lounges on a lower step, waiting for the upcoming fun. Another of her photos is of four young girls, who have their attention on passing bubbles in 1940. These girls seem to be intrigued by such a small thing with the big city in the background. In 1943, Nancy Newhall curated her first solo exhibition "Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children.” In the late 1940s, Levitt helped make two documentary films, In the Street and The Quiet One, both released in 1948. Levitt, along with others, received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of The Quiet One. Levitt was active in film making for nearly 25 years. Her next major shows were in the 60s.
In 1959 and 1960, Levitt received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take color photographs on the streets of New York. This brought her back to still photography. In 1965, she published her first major collection, A Way of Seeing. In a 1959 color photo, Levitt captures the joy of children playing in the street. The photograph is very sharp with great detail just like her black and white photographs. The children are not posing for the camera and it looks like some of them don’t even notice her. Another color photo shows two elderly people with canes crossing a street. It again shows the city life during the time and the trueness of people as cars wait for the people pass. Other images included, two hens marching past two red and white speckled chairs on the pavement outside a furnishing store or the pinks and greens of a street chariot selling "snowballs." She used unexpected angles, forcing objects to move in and out of the camera view. Her work all in all was spectacular.
Levitt ran into a big problem when a lot of her color work from the 1960s was stolen in a 1970 burglary of her apartment. Levitt went back out into the streets in the 70s with her camera to start all over again. The remaining photos that were not stolen, and others taken in the upcoming years, can be seen in the 2005 book Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt. Forty of these color photos were revealed as a slide show at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1974. This was one of the first times photographs were presented like this in a museum, and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world. Helen Levitt is considered "a photographer's photographer." This means she was little known by the public, but honored by fellow photographers. She has never wanted fame, and she didn’t enjoy talking about her life. Levitt lived in New York City and remained active as a photographer for almost 70 years.

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