Helen Levitt died on April 3, 2009 at 95 years of age. What does the life of this US photographer have to do with prams, you ask? Well, nothing and everything. There was a time, pre-air conditioning, pre-television, when people lived on city streets: elders on porches, babies in large buggies, children on sidewalks or literally playing in the street. Helen Levitt documented those days.
Levitt took her tiny camera with its faked-out lens — designed so that she could make pictures while not looking directly at her subjects — and recorded that life, in the 1930s and 1940s.
So here’s the relevant picture, taken by Levitt around 1940, in New York:
. . . along with a nod to the passing of Helen Levitt and of old-style US baby carriages and their place in our shared social history.
Read Melissa Block’s essay about Levitt on NPR.
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