01.06.09
Helen Levitt Obituary
American photographer Helen Levitt, best known for her lyrical depictions of New York City street life, died peacefully in her sleep, aged 95, on Sunday 29 March in New York.
In 1935 Levitt met Henri Cartier-Bresson and befriended Walker Evans, both of whom would prove to be major influences on her work. Immediately inspired by the possibilities which photography offered, she began photographing her mother’s friends with a used Voigtländer camera. In 1936, she bought a second-hand Leica, the camera which Cartier-Bresson used. But photojournalism didn’t interest her, she was too shy and lacked technical skills or interest. “I was a lousy technician,” she said. “That part bored me.”
In 1943, she had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and went on to show in Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 Family of Man exhibition. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, she created an astonishing body of work, taking her camera to the city’s poorer neighbourhoods, where people treated the streets as their living rooms.
To support herself, she worked as a film editor and when a friend introduced her to the great Spanish film director Luis Buñuel, he hired her to edit his pro-American propaganda films. By 1949 she had stopped shooting stills and began working as a full-time film editor, which she continued to do for the next decade.
When she returned to stills photography in 1959, it was to work in colour. Sadly, much of this early colour work was lost when her apartment was burgled in the late 1960s.
In the 1990s she gave up colour, saying that “the colours weren’t always what I wanted.” She also stopped making her own black & white prints at around the same time, as sciatica was making it difficult for her to stand for long periods of time. Carrying her Leica was also becoming a struggle, so she switched to a small automatic Contax.
She lived a quiet, modest life. Intensely private, she shunned the limelight and seldom gave interviews. Until a recent series of publications by Powerhouse in New York, she permitted the publication of only a few books of her images.
When asked what was the secret to her images she replied: “It was luck, luck is very important in this kind of stuff.” GS
Helen Levitt 1904-2009
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