Celebrated Street Photographer Helen Levitt Dies

Last night at her home in Manhattan, the Brooklyn-born and celebrated NYC street photographer Helen Levitt died at the age of 95. The NY Times remembers Levitt, saying she "captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, 'the ceremony of innocence'.” In the 1930s and 40s, the photographer focused on "the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and where she showed an unerring instinct for a street drama’s perfect pitch." By 1943 she had her first solo show at MoMA, and starting in 1949 (for a period lasting around ten years) Levitt was a full-time film editor and director. She went back to still photography, this time in color, in 1959 upon receiving two Guggenheim Foundation grants.

NPR visited with the notoriously publicity shy Levitt in 2002, and you can listen to that here. At the time she had boxes of prints stacked in her apartment, one labeled "nothing good" and another "Here and There."