New York, 1980   (Photo: Copyright Estateof Helen Levitt/Laurence Miller Gallery, New York)

Helen Levitt, who died last week, at 95, made the life of the street come alive in her photographs. Pictures of children playing, standing on stoops in Spanish Harlem, or just lost in their own worlds vibrate with the secrets of existence, and the pleasures of the sidewalk. An American Henri Cartier-Bresson, she turned a world of strangers into our extended family.

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