Stories of the street
New York, USA, circa 1940
Ask anybody with a keen interest in photography if they’ve heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson and you’ll get a near universal ‘yes’ as a response. But mention the name Helen Levitt and the answer will be much less emphatic. Yet dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that Levitt was arguably one of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century. Some of her early work, documenting life on the streets of New York City in the 1930s and ’40s, features in the new book One, Two, Three… More . So here we take a look at the career of a remarkably talented woman.
Levitt was born in 1913 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant with a wholesale knit-goods business, while her mother had been a bookkeeper before marriage. Levitt dropped out of high school and, in 1931, started working for J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx. It was
