Helen Levitt

Photographer, born in New York City, New York, USA. 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. Among her publications are A Way of Seeing: Photographs of New York (1961) with text by James Agee.

Levitt grew up in Brooklyn, New York. While teaching some classes in art to children in 1937, Levitt became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children's street culture of the time. The resulting photographs appeared, to great acclaim, in 1987 as In The Street: chalk drawings and messages, New York City 1938–1948. In 1943 Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art curated her first solo exhibition, after which she began to find press work as a documentary photographer. In the late 1940s she briefly became a film director, working with James Agee, with whom she shot the short art film In the Street. In 1959 and 1960, she received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take colour photographs on the streets of New York but much of this work was stolen in a burglary. The remaining photos, and others taken in the following years, can be seen in the book Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt (May 2005).

She has remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years and still lives in New York City. New York's "visual poet laureate" is notoriously private and publicity shy.