Helen Levitt made her photographs and her reputation on the streets of New York in the 1940s, the city where she was born, raised and lived her whole life, and which she rarely left. She died in Greenwich Village in 2009 at the age of 95.
But it began many decades earlier. In 1935 she accompanied the solitary (and famously irascible) Henri Cartier-Bresson on a working trip to Brooklyn, acquiring a second-hand Leica. She accepted a post teaching art to children in East Harlem, near her home in Yorkville, and that camera would never leave her side.
In the decade or so to come, others – such as Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Lisette Model and William Klein – would claim New York for themselves, those very streets, but Levitt was walking them earlier, a genuine pathfinder. All found a city pulsing with energy; at ground level Levitt’s slice of Manhattan was lyrical, sometimes mysterious, but with a sense of community that rose up from what could be hostile streets. The moon over the dockside, the winking neon of Times Square or Park Avenue’s traffic hurtling precipitously up and downtown held little interest for her. All human life could be found in a narrower world, the close-knit streets, stoops, fire escapes, doorways and sidewalks of the city’s poorer neighbourhoods, East Harlem and the Lower East Side. ‘I felt,’ she said, ‘they should be preserved.’
An encounter with Walker Evans, lodestar of Depression-era reportage, encouraged her to make with his friend James Agee a book of her work, which he much admired. In 1948 they did, but a reticent Levitt took it no further and A Way of Seeing lay unpublished until 1965. As she shied from scrutiny, so she avoided giving her images titles and dates, preferring the visual and emotional over the descriptive, and reluctant too to give her prints further life – friends would salvage discarded masterpieces from wastepaper baskets.
And so New York makes up the bulk of this substantial new collection of her work; only 14 photographs are taken elsewhere, one in Florida of three young men in a pool-hall doorway returning her gaze with wary disapproval, and 13 in Mexico City, where in 1941 she spent five months in the footsteps of Cartier-Bresson.
Levitt never intended a social document or any form of narrative. Don’t read too much into this, she seems to be saying, this is simply life as it is lived. People come and go, they talk, they run errands, do their chores; children make chalk drawings, they play, fight and tumble, stoop-perched gunslingers, Halloween-masked gangsters. Levitt made something of a speciality of children, but it wasn’t for particular love of them. ‘It was just that children were out in the street,’ she told the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, late in life, but she was self-evidently charmed by the naturalness of their choreography and the guilelessness of their art.
She once observed that the poor quarters of great cities were ‘battlegrounds’, but its streets also made for an open-air stage, those entering and exiting and staying for a while, actors playing their parts in a harmonious whole. And no-one seemed to mind, or perhaps even notice, the sensitive Brooklynite, still in her twenties, who became a part of their world, marking them out for ever in a time and a space all their own. Her way of seeing.
‘Helen Levitt’ 19 February-17 May MAPFRE P.º de Recoletos, 23, Centro, 28004 Madrid, Spain. For more information visit fundacionmapfre.org
A version of this story appeared in the April 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
