[2] In the autumn of 1927, after graduating from high school, he enrolled as a part-time student at the Institute, taking courses in drawing, calligraphy, and design.
As a walker and a loner, it was only natural that Levinstein would prowl the streets of New York and the beaches of Coney Island, like numerous photographers before him.
[5] The two candid photographs were shot at close quarters, his habitual approach, for which he would shoot from the hip, and one is a ground-level view of a well-to-do couple waiting for a cab, she in her voluminous fur and he in his double-breasted suit and hat.
The other is more sympathetic to the less privileged people Levinstein enjoyed photographing on the Lower East Side; an African-American woman adoringly caressing her baby as they sprawl on a rug in the dappled shade.
In her autobiography, Gee devotes the first part of chapter 13 to Levinstein and his was the first exhibition of 1956, his only solo show at Limelight , with sixty-five prints covering seven years of work by "a photographer I considered one of the best of the non-professionals.
Lunn purchased a large group of Levinstein's photographs, and his work was being included in important exhibitions of postwar documentary photography, beginning in 1978 with New Standpoints at the Museum of Modern Art.