Leon Levinstein’s Photographs of New Yorkers – NYTimes.com

There is a paradox in Levinstein’s approach that is shared by legions of greater and lesser street photographers: he was hunting for the poetry of real life, but what he shot was generally the sort of thing that street photographers generally shoot. Not the types of people or situations that you barely notice because they are so ordinary, but people who seem strange, marginal or ridiculous. The Beat generation’s coolly noirish, anti-bourgeois spirit animates his work.