Helen Levitt was born in 1913 and began photographing the streets of New York, her hometown, in the late 1930s. She focused mainly on poor neighborhoods such as Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side, where the street is the main stage of daily life.
Her interest in photography began after attending an exhibition Documentary and Anti-Graphic: Photographs by Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Alvarez Bravo in New York, in 1935. Levitt met Henri Cartier-Bresson and inspired by him in 1936 she bought a used Leica III.
Her camera was directed toward children and their street games and ‘transform everyday situations into images that convey all that life can hold of emotion, mystery, or humor’.
Levitt was a socially committed artist and one of the first women to forge a professional career in photography. This exhibition is the first to be organized based on the entirety of her work.
Levitt died in 2009 in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was a life lived as an artist with its ups and downs.
In recognition of her work as an artist she received the Francis J. Greenburger Award for Excellence in the Arts for "artists who have made important contributions to the fields of contemporary art but for one reason or another have not been fully recognized by the world at large".
It was great we were able to see her work and reflect on a life lived as an artist.
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