The classic Photofile series brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at a reasonable price. Handsome and collectible, each book contains a selection of the photographer’s most important and representative images in beautiful duotone and/or color, plus an introduction and a bibliography.

This new addition to the series features the work of Helen Levitt. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Helen Levitt is best known for her photographs of New York, which have inspired generations of photographers, collectors, and a general audience entranced by images of daily life in the great city. Helen Levitt’s first major museum exhibition was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and a second solo show was held there in 1974. Retrospectives of her work have been shown at museums across America and around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.

Helen Levitt (1913–2009) was an assistant to Walker Evans and a friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but forged her own path with fierce independence and endless curiosity about the world around her. She is best known for her street photography, capturing children at play on the streets of Depression-era New York and chalk drawings on walls, but she also cast her eye upon the adult world, seeking out moments of movement, transience and theatricality.

Following her first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1943, she devoted more than a decade to filmmaking, but returned to photography in the late 1950s and began to work in colour as well as black and white. Lyrical and witty, her images reveal the streets of New York as flowing with life and unexpected poetry.

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