Helen Levitt, 95; captured images of NYC street life

Helen Levitt was once described as "the supreme poet-photographer of the streets and people of New York." Her images were taken primarily in Spanish Harlem, Yorkville, and the Lower East Side. (Photos © Estate of Helen Levitt)

Helen Levitt, a master of street photography whose images of children playing in New York during the late 1930s and early '40s are classics of 20th-century photography, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.

The New York Times said Ms. Levitt's brother, Bill, of Alta, Utah, confirmed her death.

The critic Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker in 2001, described Ms. Levitt as "the supreme poet-photographer of the streets and people of New York."

Her images, taken primarily in Spanish Harlem, Yorkville, and the Lower East Side, present a dynamic city, but one that is also mysterious and vaguely menacing. Scrawled messages are chalked on streets and walls. Children carry toy guns and wear masks. Ms. Levitt's subjects, while often vibrant and playful, are hardly innocent.

Ms. Levitt's photography is as famous for its children as Ansel Adams's is for mountains or Richard Avedon's for fashion models.

"People think I love children, but I don't," Ms. Levitt told Gopnik. "Not more than the next person. It was just that children were out in the streets."

In such practicality, one finds a key to Ms. Levitt's artistry. There is a matter-of-fact quality to her work that helps give it enormous staying power. Her pictures are devoid of local-color quaintness or family-of-man uplift. She looked, she shot, she printed - simple as that - and in that simplicity one finds a reason for her work's enduring value.

Ms. Levitt's New York is a very human, if not necessarily humane, place: a city defined by the people who inhabit it rather than the buildings that line its streets. Life is lived on those streets (and stoops and sidewalks). Ms. Levitt's pictures owe a debt to sociology and psychology, not to architecture.

"For my kind of work," Ms. Levitt told the Associated Press in 1993, "a street with lots of people is important. I'm not a landscape person."

Her work was very much of a time as well as of a place: the pre-war years, when a sense of community, even family, spilled out from indoors. "That was before television and air conditioning," Ms. Levitt told the Chicago Tribune in 2002. "People would be outside and if you just waited long enough, they forgot about you."

Being forgotten about was something Ms. Levitt specialized in. She was famous for her diffidence, rarely sitting for interviews and sometimes going years without taking photographs. "People say, 'What does this or that mean?' " she said in the Tribune interview. "And I don't have a good answer for them. 'You see what you see.' "

Ms. Levitt was born in Brooklyn. Dropping out of high school, she went to work for a commercial photographer in the Bronx.

Her two favorite photographers were Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She met the latter in 1945. A later strong influence would be Ben Shahn's photography.

"I wanted to be a photographer because I wanted to be an artist and I couldn't draw," she told The New Yorker in 2001. "Started to take pictures of black people and working-class neighborhoods. I found them extremely exotic. I was affected by the time, and I tried to photograph the working class. Show 'conditions.' Cartier-Bresson's work was a revelation. He showed that using a camera to show 'conditions' was a limited thing. I started photographing people."

Ms. Levitt bought her first camera, used, in 1936. It was a 35mm Leica because that was the camera Cartier-Bresson used. She met Walker Evans, and the two became friends and collaborators. She shared a darkroom with Evans, helped him print his photographs, and accompanied him on his famous photographic excursions on the New York Subway.

Through Evans, Ms. Levitt met the writer James Agee, who would write the introduction to her first book, "A Way of Seeing" (1965). They later collaborated on a pair of documentary films: the feature-length "The Quiet One" (1949), about a 10-year-old at a facility for delinquents; and a short subject, "In the Street" (1952).

Ms. Levitt's first published photography was in Fortune, in 1939. The only photo assignment she ever had was from Sports Illustrated for a story about New Yorkers who kept pigeons on their roofs. She enjoyed recounting how her pictures were rejected because bird droppings were visible in them.

New York's Museum of Modern Art gave Ms. Levitt her first solo exhibition in 1943. Others have been mounted by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

She set aside her camera for much of the '40s and '50s, supporting herself as a film editor. Among the directors she worked with was Luis Bunuel. She returned to photography in 1959, concentrating on New York's Garment District. She also began taking color photographs. Asked in a 2004 interview with The New York Times whether she preferred color or black and white, Ms. Levitt gave a characteristically offhand response: "Whatever roll of film I have, that's what I'll shoot."

Later collections of Ms. Levitt's work include "In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages 1938-1948" (1987); "Helen Levitt: Mexico City" (1997); "Crosstown" (2001); and "Here and There" (2003).

Ms. Levitt didn't have any of her own pictures hanging in her Greenwich Village apartment. "I know what they look like," she told National Public Radio in 2002. "I don't want to look at them all the time."

Ms. Levitt never married. Her brother is her only immediate survivor.