helen levitt

Helen Levitt, whose photography caught 'fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quite drama' on the streets of her native New York, died at home in Manhattan on Sunday.

In his preface to Levitt's book,  A Way of Seeing, James Agee wrote 'Like most good artists, Miss Levitt is no intellectual and no theorist; she works, quite simply, where she feels most at home, and that, naturally enough, is where the kind of thing that moves and interests her is likely to occur most naturally and in best abundance'.

'The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization.'

For a retrospective of her work, see Helen Levitt: New York Streets 1938 to 1990s at lensculture and obituary in the Guardian by Amanda Hopkinson