I've always admired the street photography of Helen Levitt, and the way that she was able to represent working class street life in New York with her Leica. I didn't realize that she passed away in 2009.

I'd always connected her work with Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities; a text that continues to resonate today with the ongoing gentrification of the inner city in a knowledge economy.

What I didn't know was Levitt's colour work in the 1970s and 1980s; nor that she was an early pioneer of color photography. based on two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take color photographs on the streets of New York inn 1959 and 1960. Much of her work in color from first decade’s was stolen in a 1970 burglary of her East 13th Street apartment. What we have are remaining photos, and others taken in the following years.

I also didn't know that in the late 1940s Levitt made two documentary films with Janice Loeb and James Agee: In the Street (1948) and The Quiet One (1948) and that she was active in film making for nearly 25 years; her final film credit is as an editor for John Cohen’s documentary The End of an Old Song (1972).

Levitt's street photographs represented the vitality of inner city life.For her it was the quality, not quantity, of street life that counts:

Jane Jacobs interest was in why certain city districts and cities thrived, while other city districts and cities stagnated and declined. She identified four general conditions for city diversity: mixed primary uses; small blocks (or plentiful streets); aged buildings (a diversity of building types); high-densities ("the need for concentration").

Diversity for Jacobs meant the whole diversity of a "great" city, including skyscrapers, department stores, highways (especially for trucking), big medical centers, etc. For Jacobs truly healthy cities had diverse districts as well as districts that were internally diverse.