ence on Levitt’s own photographs. Like Evans,
Helen Levitt wanted to remain a bodiless eye, on
the edge of her subject’s periphery, so that her photo-
graphs had an authentic and unrehearsed style.
It was, in fact,her meeting with Walker Evans that
fueled the majority of Levitt’s career. As her mentor,
Evans introduced the young Levitt to his then-colla-
borator, James Agee, who later would become both
hercollaboratorandstrongestadmirer.Throughher
study under Evans, Levitt honed her craft, and cre-
ated a distinct style that borrowed her mentor’s own
detached indifference. This style is most clearly evi-
dent in her first major photographic collection of her
trip to Mexico City with Alma and Joel Agee, James
Agee’swifeandinfantson.HerphotographsinMex-
ico recall Walker Evans’s own photographs inThe
Crime of Cuba; though Levitt frequently chose chil-
dren as her subjects, the photographs of Mexico City
are darker and more bleak than any she had taken in
New York City. Many of them focused on the rural
poor and their stifling living conditions and inade-
quate surroundings. Many of her Mexico City por-
traits contain a cinematic movement, captured
through several photographs taken in rapid succes-
sion. And like Evans’s photographs of Cuba, Levitt
stopped short of making any absolute political
statement, deciding instead to nestle her commen-
tary in ambiguous vessels.
The subtle detail and clarity of her subjects won
Levitt her first solo exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1943, a following photography fel-
lowship, and a great reputation in the growing pho-
tographic community. Her photographs began to
appear with regularity in popular magazines and
photo journals of the time alongside her mentors
and colleagues, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and
Margaret Bourke-White. After her return from
Mexico City, Agee and Levitt began a lengthy and
productive collaboration together. Both artists be-
lieved in the power of the ordinary, in the poetry
hidden within the mundane world, and their asso-
ciation reflected it. Together, they produced a short
book,A Way of Seeing, as well as two critically
acclaimed documentary films,The Quiet Oneand
In The Streets. In the academy-award nominated
The Quiet One, Agee performed the narration for
Levitt’s film about an emotionally disturbed Af-
rican American student at a reform school, while
theIn The Streetsdocumented the urban life in the
streets of East Harlem in the 1940s.
Her focus on film kept her away from photogra-
phy for the majority of the next decade, though she
briefly studied at the Art Students League in New
York, and became interested in the method and
production of color photography. She returned to
the streets of New York and began, again, to docu-
ment them through the new color medium she had
studied. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow-
ship for her efforts and produced a show at the
Museum of Modern Art. Unfortunately, the mas-
ter slides from Levitt’s show were stolen from the
museum and have yet to be recovered.
Levitt still works and lives in the city she helped to
document. A retrospective of her photographs of
New York from 1937–1945 was displayed at the
Laurence Miller Gallery, and countless people have
recently re-discovered the beauty and lyrical simpli-
city of Helen Levitt. Within the group of 1930s doc-
umentary photographers, Helen Levitt stands as a
chronicler of the quiet, undiscovered subjects, the
overlooked beauty of the mundane. Her photo-
graphs of children translate their play into a visceral,
sharedlanguage. Unlikemanyof thephotographs of
the century, Levitt’s work makes no overt political
statement; her subjects are captured just as they are,
without commentary or dialogue with their audi-
ence. In fact, through her photographs, an audience
looses its identity,becomes thetransparent eyeof the
camera lens and discovers her shared way of seeing.
AndyCrank
Seealso: Bourke-White, Margaret; Bravo, Manuel
A ́lvarez; Evans, Walker; Shahn, Ben; Street Photo-
graphyBiography
Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1918. Photography Fellow-
ship, Museum of Modern Art, 1946; Guggenheim Fel-
lowship, 1959, 1960; Ford Foundation Fellowship, 1964;
New York State Council on the Arts Creative Artist’s
Grant, 1974; National Endowment for the Arts Photo-
graphy Fellowship, 1976; John Simon Guggenheim Me-
morial Fellowship, 1981; Friends of Photography Peer
Award for Distinguished Career in Photography, 1987;
Outstanding Achievement in Humanistic Photography,
1997; Master of Photography Award, 1997.Selected Individual Exhibitions
1943 Photographs of Children; Museum of Modern Art,
New York
1992 Helen Levitt; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
San Francisco, California
1994 Helen Levitt: Fotografias; Diputacion Provincial, Gra-
nada, Spain
1995 Helen Levitt: Old, New, and Seldom Seen; Laurence
Miller Gallery, New York, New York
1997 Mexico City; Center for Creative Photography, Tuc-
son, Arizona
Crosstown; International Center of Photography,
New York, New York
Helen Levitt: Vintage New York, 1937–1945; Laurence
Miller Gallery, New York, New YorkLEVITT, HELEN