By Daryl Lang
© Helen Levitt / Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
New York, c.1940 (baby carriage). Shooting with a compact camera with a right-angle viewfinder, Levitt became a pioneer of street photography.
Helen Levitt, whose precise, fly-on-the-wall shots of city
life helped define the aesthetic of 20th-century documentary
photography, died Sunday at age 95.
Her death was reported in
The
New York Times, which cited a family member.
Capturing scenes as ordinary as children playing, workers sitting
on a tailgate, or pedestrians crossing a street, Levitt found
poetry in the frozen moments of New York City street life.
Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Levitt began her long photography career
working for a commercial photographer in the Bronx. Levitt decided
to pursue photography of her own sort in the 1930s and would wander
the city streets, observing families and neighbors crowded on
stoops on hot summer evenings. She often photographed in Spanish
Harlem.
“I decided I should take pictures of working class people and
contribute to the movements, whatever movements there
were—Socialism, Communism, whatever was happening,” Levitt said in
a
2002 interview with NPR. “And then I saw pictures of
Cartier-Bresson, and realized that photography could be an art, and
that made me ambitious.”
In addition to
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Levitt was influenced
by
Walker Evans and fellow street photographer
Ben
Shahn. Legendary Museum of Modern Art curator
Edward
Steichen curated Levitt's first solo exhibition in 1943.
Levitt shot with a Leica, the camera preferred by Cartier-Bresson
and others for its low profile. She installed a right-angle
viewfinder, to shoot unobtrusively. Her photographs often show
spontaneous moments in which her subjects are unaware they are
being photographed.
Levitt dabbled in film-making in the 1940s and 1950s, and switched
to color film in the 1960s, but later returned to black-and-white
stills.
Numerous museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have presented
retrospectives of Levitt’s work, and she has many major art awards
including a 1959 Guggenheim Fellowship.
While publishing little if any new work in recent years, she
continued to shoot and her books and museum exhibitions drew
unceasing acclaim. Last year she won the Francis Greenburger award
for excellence in the arts and the SPECTRUM International Prize for
Photography.
Her first monograph,
A Way of Seeing, was published in 1965.
Other notable books include 1987’s
In The Street: Chalk Drawings
And Messages, New York City, 1938-1948, and 2001’s
Crosstown. A collection of her work,
Helen Levitt,
was published in 2008 by powerhouse books.
New York Street Photographer Helen Levitt Dies at 95
March 30, 2009
By Daryl Lang
New York, c.1940 (baby carriage). Shooting with a compact camera with a right-angle viewfinder, Levitt became a pioneer of street photography.
Helen Levitt, whose precise, fly-on-the-wall shots of city life helped define the aesthetic of 20th-century documentary photography, died Sunday at age 95.
Her death was reported in
The New York Times, which cited a family member.
Capturing scenes as ordinary as children playing, workers sitting on a tailgate, or pedestrians crossing a street, Levitt found poetry in the frozen moments of New York City street life.
Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Levitt began her long photography career working for a commercial photographer in the Bronx. Levitt decided to pursue photography of her own sort in the 1930s and would wander the city streets, observing families and neighbors crowded on stoops on hot summer evenings. She often photographed in Spanish Harlem.
“I decided I should take pictures of working class people and contribute to the movements, whatever movements there were—Socialism, Communism, whatever was happening,” Levitt said in a
2002 interview with NPR. “And then I saw pictures of Cartier-Bresson, and realized that photography could be an art, and that made me ambitious.”
In addition to
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Levitt was influenced by
Walker Evans and fellow street photographer
Ben Shahn. Legendary Museum of Modern Art curator
Edward Steichen curated Levitt's first solo exhibition in 1943.
Levitt shot with a Leica, the camera preferred by Cartier-Bresson and others for its low profile. She installed a right-angle viewfinder, to shoot unobtrusively. Her photographs often show spontaneous moments in which her subjects are unaware they are being photographed.
Levitt dabbled in film-making in the 1940s and 1950s, and switched to color film in the 1960s, but later returned to black-and-white stills.
Numerous museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have presented retrospectives of Levitt’s work, and she has many major art awards including a 1959 Guggenheim Fellowship.
While publishing little if any new work in recent years, she continued to shoot and her books and museum exhibitions drew unceasing acclaim. Last year she won the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts and the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography.
Her first monograph,
A Way of Seeing, was published in 1965. Other notable books include 1987’s
In The Street: Chalk Drawings And Messages, New York City, 1938-1948, and 2001’s
Crosstown. A collection of her work,
Helen Levitt, was published in 2008 by powerhouse books.
