Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt was an American photographer born in 1913. She died in New York in 2009. In 1935, she met Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, and decided to devote herself to photography. She began by taking pictures of street life in the poorer neighbourhoods of New York with a Leica 35mm. In the late 1930s, her photos began being published in magazines such as Fortune and PM. In 1941, she travelled to Mexico and worked as a film editor for Luis Buñuel who she met through her painter friend Janice Loeb. In 1943, New York’s Museum of Modern Art put on her first exhibition. Soon after the war, in partnership with the writer James Agee, she began designing the book “A Way of Seeing” (published in 1965), and co-directed with Agee and Loeb two films considered pioneers of independent American arthouse cinema, “The Quiet One” (1949) and “In the Street” (1952). She then devoted herself entirely to directing and cinematographic editing. There have been many retrospectives of her work, among them at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1991), the Documenta X in Kassel (1997) and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris (2007).