Please inquire about framing options. Helen Levitt was an American photographer and cinematographer whose career spanned 60 years. Known for her street photography around New York City, her photographs bring to life the streets by intimately documenting the daily activities of local minority communities in an honest and playful way. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Helen Levitt dropped out of high school and pursued work with a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx. She learned the practical side of developing photographs and was a professional photographer by her late teenage years. Inspired by masters such as Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt took her Leica 35mm camera and began capturing the essence and theatrics of New York streets in the 20th century. Over time, her photographs recorded the social and economical changes in New York. Her earlier photographs showed streets filled with people walking and children playing. By the late 1960s to the 1980s, the streets became more aggressive, bustling with activity and automobiles instead of people. Levitt received two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1960. Today her work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.