[Leica] Helen Levitt: In Memoriam

[kenlass at gate.net (Ken Lassiter)]

This was posted on the PMA Newsline today:

"In memoriam: Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught 
fleeting moments of mystery and drama on the streets of her native New 
York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95. 
Her death was confirmed to The New York Times 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/arts/design/30levitt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Helen%20Levitt&st=cse>
 
by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

  Helen Levitt was born on Aug. 31, 1913, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, N.Y. 
Her father, Sam, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a successful wholesale 
knit-goods business; her mother, May, was a bookkeeper before her 
marriage. Finding high school unstimulating, Levitt dropped out during 
her senior year. In a 2002 interview with The New York Times in her 
fourth-floor walk-up near Union Square, she said that as a young woman 
she had wanted to do something in the arts though she could not draw well.

  Her mother knew the family of J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial 
portrait photographer in the Bronx, and in 1931 Levitt began to work for 
him. With a used Voigtl?nder camera, she photographed her mother's friends.

  Through publications and exhibitions, she knew the documentary work of 
members of the Film and Photo League and of Henri Cartier-Bresson, 
Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. In 1935 she met Cartier-Bresson when he 
spent a year in New York. On one occasion she accompanied him when he 
photographed along the Brooklyn waterfront. She also trained her eye, 
she said, by going to museums and art galleries. In 1936, she bought a 
secondhand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson favored.

  Two years later, she contacted Walker Evans to show him the 
photographs she had taken of children playing in the streets and their 
buoyant chalk graffiti and they eventually became freinds. She helped 
Evans make prints for his exhibition and book "American Photographs."

  Both the quintessentially French Cartier-Bresson and the essentially 
American Evans influenced Levitt, says The New York Times. 
Cartier-Bresson had a gift for catching everyday life in graceful flux; 
Evans had a way of being sparingly direct with his subjects. Levitt 
credited Shahn, whom she had met through Evans, with being a greater 
influence than Evans. Photographs Shahn took of life on New York 
sidewalks in the 1930s have a gritty spontaneity.

  The late 1930s and early 1940s, Levitt created an astonishing body. 
She took her camera to the city's poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish 
Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as 
their living rooms. Fortune magazine was the first to publish her work, 
in its July 1939 issue on New York City, reports The New York Times. The 
next year her famous Halloween picture was included in the inaugural 
exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department. In 1943 
she had her first solo show at the Modern.

  To support herself, Levitt worked as a film editor. Her friend Janice 
Loeb, a painter, introduced her to Luis Bu?uel, who hired her in the 
early 1940s to edit his pro-American propaganda films. By 1949, and for 
the next decade, Levitt was a full-time film editor and director.

  When Levitt returned to still photography in 1959, it was to work in 
color; she was among the first notable photographers to do so, says The 
New York Times. She was helped in this project by Guggenheim fellowships 
that she received in 1959 and 1960. Much of this early color work was 
lost when her apartment was burglarized in the late 1960s. In the 1990s 
she gave up color, saying the colors weren't always what she wanted.

  Levitt shunned the limelight and seldom gave interviews. (She did talk 
with National Public Radio's <http://www.npr.org> Melissa Block in 2002 
and that interview 
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1136521> can be 
heard online.) Comprehensive surveys of her career were held at the 
Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller 
Gallery in 1987. But she remained little known to the general public 
even as late as 1991, when the first national retrospective of her work 
was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to 
major museums."

...Ken Lassiter