After working for a commercial portrait photographer, in 1936 Helen Levitt became a photographer in her own right. Inspired by the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson, she began to capture pictures of street life in poor neighborhoods of her native New York with a 35-mm Leica camera. By the end of the 1930s, her images began appearing in magazines such as Fortune and PM. In 1943 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized her first show. Two years later Levitt collaborated with James Agee, with whom she also worked on her seminal photobook A Way of Seeing, and painter Janice Loeb on the film In the Street. For the next decade she devoted herself to directing and film editing.