New York Archive / Black & White features previously unpublished photographs from Helen Levitt’s archive alongside a selection of her most iconic images. Levitt’s unsentimental yet deeply empathetic vision—once described by Walker Evans as “anti-journalistic”—defined a singular street aesthetic, capturing the rhythms, improvisational nature and exuberant humanity of everyday life. A pioneering figure of twentieth-century street photography, Levitt began photographing the people of her native city in the 1930s, often working in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. Her camera recorded fleeting encounters, children’s games and chalk graffiti with lyrical restraint, visual humor and extraordinary clarity. An illuminating essay by photographer Tod Papageorge explores her extraordinary ability to “trap those moments when form and meaning spark together in a flash of ignition.”