Creator Bio

Helen Levitt

1913–2009

American photographer Helen Levitt studied and worked with Walker Evans in the late 1930s. In the 1940s, she began to photograph children in New York City, producing the black-and-white street photography for which she is best known. In 1943, Edward Steichen curated her first solo exhibition, Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children, at the Museum of Modern Art. Later in the decade, she and James Agee collaborated on two films about New York street life. In 1959–1960, two Guggenheim Foundation grants made it possible for Levitt to become one of the first street photographers to work in color. Much of this work was stolen in a burglary of her apartment, but the remaining items, along with other color photographs taken in later years, were published in Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt (2005).

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

Primary Source

New York, 1979

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Levitt was best known for her black-and-white photographs of children at play, often found in doorways or on stoops, in New York City. It is far less known that she was also a pioneer of color…