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[Chalk Drawing, New York]
Helen Levitt American
Not on view
The streets of New York were both Helen Levitt’s home and a foreign land waiting to be explored with her small 35 mm Leica. Born in Brooklyn, she emerged in the mid-1930s as a savvy street photographer inspired at first by the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and later by European and Soviet cinema. On the way to and from a Federal Art Project teaching job in Spanish Harlem during the late 1930s, Levitt recorded neighborhood children at play, as well as their expressive graffiti and elegiac chalk messages soon to be washed away by their parents or the rain.
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![[Chalk Drawing, New York], Helen Levitt (American, 1913–2009), Gelatin silver print](/Rodan/dist/svg/rolling-0.9s-30px.svg)
