Born 1913, Brooklyn, New York
Died 2009

Levitt dropped out of high school in her senior year to work as a darkroom assistant to a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx. Soon thereafter, she began taking photographs, primarily of children on the streets of New York City. Largely self-taught, she counted the photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, the painter Ben Shahn, and the writer James Agee among her early influences. Her work was first published in Fortune magazine (1939) and one of her most famous photographs, Halloween, was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department in 1940. She had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943 and showed her work at the Photo League in that year and again in 1949. She attended meetings of the League but was not an official member. Levitt worked as a film editor and director from 1949 to 1972. She made two documentaries with Agee and the painter Janice Loeb: In the Street (1948), a short silent film about Spanish Harlem; and The Quiet One (1948; dir. Sidney Meyers), for which she (along with Loeb and Meyers) received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. In 1959 and 1960 she was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships to explore still street photography using color film. She published her first book, A Way of Seeing, with Agee in 1965. Levitt returned to black-and-white photography in the 1990s. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art (1974); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1983); Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm (1985); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1991); the International Center of Photography, New York (1997); Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris (2007); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2008); and Photo España, Madrid (2010).