Helen Levitt (1913-2009) was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for "street photography" around New York City, and has been called "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."
In 1936, Helen Levitt found a medium for her "unconscious obsession": she began photographing children's play in the streets of her native New York City. Wandering through working-class neighborhoods—looking for the right kind of "material: and "a proper shot," as she puts it, by scouting street life in Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and the Bronx—Levitt uncovered hidden worlds playing out on stoops and sidewalks.
The photographs she made early in her career (roughly 1936 to 1950) are preoccupied with children who fabricate, from the barest threads of the imagination, their own "strange weave of time and space," to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin.
In 1936, Helen Levitt found a medium for her "unconscious obsession": she began photographing children's play in the streets of her native New York City. Wandering through working-class neighborhoods—looking for the right kind of "material: and "a proper shot," as she puts it, by scouting street life in Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and the Bronx—Levitt uncovered hidden worlds playing out on stoops and sidewalks.
The photographs she made early in her career (roughly 1936 to 1950) are preoccupied with children who fabricate, from the barest threads of the imagination, their own "strange weave of time and space," to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin.
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