LeonLevinstein

Leon Levinstein (1910, Buckhannon, West Virginia – 1988) was an American street photographer best known for documenting everyday life in New York City from the 1950s through the 1980s. He studied drawing, calligraphy, and design at the Maryland Institute of Arts in Baltimore before working through the 1930s as a graphic designer and layout artist for a Baltimore furniture company.

Levinstein came to photography relatively late, studying at the Photo League with the influential teacher Sid Grossman in the late 1940s. In 1950 he attended a class taught by Lisette Model, and between 1954 and 1960 he was a student in the painting workshop of her husband Evsa Model. Working as a solitary walker of the city's streets and beaches — particularly Coney Island and the Lower East Side — he developed a close, unsentimental, ground-level style of candid portraiture, often shooting from the hip.

His photographs appeared in U.S. Camera Annual through the 1950s and in five Popular Photography annuals, and in 1952 he won Popular Photography's international photography contest. In 1955 Edward Steichen selected two of his images for the Museum of Modern Art's landmark touring exhibition The Family of Man, seen by nine million visitors worldwide. He had his only solo show during his lifetime at Helen Gee's Limelight Gallery in New York in 1956, and in 1975 received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Levinstein's reputation grew substantially after his death, with major posthumous exhibitions including a 1995 retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, and a 2010 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.