Photographer. A prolific artist of the camera, she is remembered for finding and capturing images on the sidewalks of New York City over a 70 year career. Raised by a well-off Brooklyn family, she decided on a career in art at an early age, but after finding that she was not very good at drawing dropped out of high school and in 1931 started working in the darkroom of a professional photographer for six dollars per week. While studying the work of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Miss Levitt used a second-hand Voigtlander to begin documenting the street scenes of her home. After meeting Cartier-Bresson in 1935, she refined her visual sense by visiting museums and art galleries and switched cameras to the Leica he favored. It was around this time that she made her best-known picture, "Halloween, 1939", which depicts three children getting ready to go trick-or-treating. She began to publish in "Fortune" in July of 1939 and her work was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1940, with her initial solo exhibition there coming in 1943. From the late 1940s, she was a film editor for about 25 years, earning an Oscar nomination for "The Quiet One" (1948), though in later years she was to consider her movie work the least important part of her career. A pioneer of color photography, Miss Levitt earned Guggenheim Fellowships for this work in 1959 and 1960, though she was never really satisfied with early color technology. Books of her prints began to appear with the 1965 "A Way of Seeing", publication increasing in her later years with 1997's "Mexico City", her only collection not having New York as its subject. She was to follow with 2001's "Crosstown", "Here and There" (2004), the 2005 "Slide Show", and 2008's "Helen Levitt". From the 1990s on, health problems forced her to quit making her own prints and to use a smaller camera. Of the changes in her city and art over the years, she said: "I go where there's a lot of activity. Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something".
Photographer. A prolific artist of the camera, she is remembered for finding and capturing images on the sidewalks of New York City over a 70 year career. Raised by a well-off Brooklyn family, she decided on a career in art at an early age, but after finding that she was not very good at drawing dropped out of high school and in 1931 started working in the darkroom of a professional photographer for six dollars per week. While studying the work of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Miss Levitt used a second-hand Voigtlander to begin documenting the street scenes of her home. After meeting Cartier-Bresson in 1935, she refined her visual sense by visiting museums and art galleries and switched cameras to the Leica he favored. It was around this time that she made her best-known picture, "Halloween, 1939", which depicts three children getting ready to go trick-or-treating. She began to publish in "Fortune" in July of 1939 and her work was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1940, with her initial solo exhibition there coming in 1943. From the late 1940s, she was a film editor for about 25 years, earning an Oscar nomination for "The Quiet One" (1948), though in later years she was to consider her movie work the least important part of her career. A pioneer of color photography, Miss Levitt earned Guggenheim Fellowships for this work in 1959 and 1960, though she was never really satisfied with early color technology. Books of her prints began to appear with the 1965 "A Way of Seeing", publication increasing in her later years with 1997's "Mexico City", her only collection not having New York as its subject. She was to follow with 2001's "Crosstown", "Here and There" (2004), the 2005 "Slide Show", and 2008's "Helen Levitt". From the 1990s on, health problems forced her to quit making her own prints and to use a smaller camera. Of the changes in her city and art over the years, she said: "I go where there's a lot of activity. Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something".
Bio by: Bob Hufford
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