Born 1910, Buckhannon, West Virginia
Died 1988


Levinstein grew up in West Virginia and Baltimore, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Art (1927–28, 1933). During World War II he served in the Air Corps as a propeller- repair mechanic in Panama (1942–45). Levinstein then moved to New York, where he studied painting with Stuart Davis and photography with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research. In 1947 he continued his photography education in classes with John Ebstel and Sid Grossman at the Photo League. For the next three decades Levinstein took candid photographs of people on the street. He had a solo exhibition at Helen Gee's Limelight Gallery in 1956 and was included in several group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. His photographs also appeared in U.S. Camera Annual and Popular Photography throughout the 1950s. Levinstein won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. Still, his reputation remained modest until a 1995 posthumous retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada reexamined his accomplishments. There have been several publications and exhibitions of his work since then, notably "Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein's New York Photographs, 1950–1980" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010.