It would take someone like the late great Delmore Schwartz to honor Helen Levitt, who just died at 95, the way she'd really deserve: with our modest, limited means we can only say that Helen Levitt is to 20th Century New York what Dickens is to 19th Century London, and what Brunelleschi is to 15th Century Florence.
No one has depicted the life and the feeling of this great city, the feeling of, as Schwartz himself wrote, "Being amid six million souls, their breath / An empty song suppressed on every side", the way Levitt did in her images.
To Opera Chic, Helen Levitt is New York. She can't think of better praise for Levitt's work.
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