Iconic photographer Helen Levitt died at the age of 95 on Sunday.

Levitt, who was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was renowned for a decades-long career documenting her home city of New York in her glorious photos that captured the daily drama of city life. Her photos often depicted unguarded moments in the lives of children, and were among the greatest of those shot in the late ’30s and ’40s. This 1939 photo (left) of three kids getting ready to trick-or-treat remains one of her best.

A high-school dropout with artistic yearnings, Levitt learned her craft after apprenticing with commercial photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. They met when he spent a year in New York and, according to The New York Times, she, at times, accompanied him as he photographed the Brooklyn waterfront. Meanwhile, the city’s museums and galleries helped Levitt learn composition and she began to shoot her street photos of children and their chalk drawings. She reached out to Walker Evans to show him this work, which he loved, and they became friends. James Agee became another friend.

By 1939, Levitt’s photos had been published in Fortune magazine, and, by 1940, her work was included in the first photography show held at the Museum of Modern art. Levitt also worked in film for 25 years as an editor, director and writer. But it was as a photographer that she won her greatest fame. In 1959 she turned to color photography — one of the first major photographers to do so — but when her apartment was burglarized in the late ’60s, most of her early color work was stolen. She returned to her first love, black and white.

Levitt never sought attention. She gave few interviews and the first major retrospective of her work wasn’t organized until 1991. Luckily, starting with Crosstown, PowerHouse Books has published some volumes of her work, including Here and There, Slide Show and Helen Levitt.