DEK

Her tombstone ought to read: She never missed a thing. Helen Levitt's quite photographs and films captured the rambunctiousness of New York City street life for the better part of a century--the life of stoops and alleys and vendors and hopscotch games chalked out on sidewalks. The strange thing was, as soon as she turned what she saw into a photograph, the picture acquired a meditative stillness, a quietness that gave you room to study the image. It was as if with each picture she loaned you her hyper sense of attentiveness--attentiveness that most people simply do not bring to daily life. Levitt was particularly gifted when it came to photographing children. More than almost anyone, she burrowed into their private, no-grown-ups-allowed world, and then she caught it all on film for rest of us. Those images are loving and humane but never sappy or cliched. She was the best of the city: street smart, ebullient, never taken in by anything but charmed by almost everything she saw. You could call it hard-boiled innocence. Only in New York.