Helen Levitt made her decision to become a photographer after seeing the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1930; she emulated him by taking her first pictures in the working-class neighborhoods of New York with a small Leica camera. She studied photography with Walker Evans in 1938–1939. Her first solo exhibition took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943. In 1945 Levitt began working with 16 millimeter motion picture equipment and eventually produced The Quiet One with James Agee in 1948 and In the Street with Agee and Janice Loeb in 1952. She studied painting at the Art Student's League in New York in 1956—1957. Again working with James Agee in 1965, she published her first book, A Way of Seeing. Levitt currently resides in New York City, where she has worked as a freelance photographer and filmmaker since 1947.

National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)