Levitt, Helen

Levitt, Helen

(born Aug. 31, 1913, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. photographer. She began her career in photography at age 18. Her first show, “Photographs of Children,” was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943. It featured the subject matter—children, especially the underprivileged—and humanity that characterize much of her work. In the mid 1940s Levitt collaborated with the novelist James Agee, filmmaker Sidney Meyers, and painter Janice Loeb on The Quiet One, a prizewinning documentary about a young African American boy. For most of the 1960s she concentrated on film editing and directing. Levitt resumed her pursuit of photography in the 1970s.

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Levitt, Helen (1918–  ) photographer; born in New York City. She studied at New York's Art Students' League while working as a free-lance photographer (from 1939) and making some short films. Her primary subject was New York street life, and her work was exhibited at galleries and museums including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yale University. Her publications include A Way of Seeing: Photographs of New York, with text by James Agee (1961).