Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt came from a humble background

Helen Levitt was born in Brooklyn, New York City on 31 August 1913. She spent her childhood on the busy streets of Brooklyn and became acquainted with the world she would later portray with passion and sensitivity. As the child of an immigrant family, she was aware of inequality and discrimination from an early age. After abandoning high school, in 1931 she worked for a Brooklyn-based portrait photographer, where she learnt the technical foundations of the craft of photography. Her acquaintance with the French star photographer Henri Carter-Bresson in 1935 made a deep impression on the young photographer and she began to see photography as an art form, bought a used Leica in 1936, and attached an angle finder that allowed her to take photographs relatively inconspicuously in public. She thus wandered the streets and took her first spontaneous photos of the everyday lives of the people around her. In 1938 she met Walker Evans and became his assistant. 

Successful photographer and filmmaker

In 1939, Helen Levitt celebrated her first publication in a special issue of the magazine Fortune, and only one year later her works could be seen in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. During the Second World War, she travelled to Mexico and worked as film editor for the Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel, whilst a book project started after the war together with the poet and political activist James Agee, titled A Way of Seeing, lasted for two decades because Levitt time and again worked as a filmmaker in-between. Also with Agee and the painter Janice Loeb, Helen Levitt made the successful documentary films In the Street and, above all, The Quiet One, which earned her an Oscar nomination. Levitt’s films are considered early precursors of the later Independent scene. In 1943, Levitt mounted her first solo exhibition in MOMA; under the title Photographs of Children, she showed her pictures of children at play. 

Unmistakeable sense for the best moment

Helen Levitt photographed at a time when life primarily took place on the street. There was no air conditioning and no entertainment electronics, but there was freedom and imagination. Although she is best known today for her photos of children playing, she also photographed other age groups and always found passers-by on the streets who spontaneously and visibly enjoyed posing for a shot. Following her foray into the film world, she returned to photography in the 1950s, working almost exclusively in colour and only creating new black and white images in the 1980s. Time and again, she proved her instinct for the right moment, photographed people who pushed themselves into the centre of attention with just as much style as those who preferred to stay shyly on the sidelines. For the artist, intuition, not intelligence was the decisive prerequisite for the creation of great art. The art critic David Levi Strauss called Helen Levitt “the most famous and at the same time most unknown photographer of her time”. 

Helen Levitt died in her hometown of New York on 29 March 2009.