As Helen Levitt roamed the streets of New York in 1939 and 1940, she collected a record of the fears and fantasies of children exuberantly expressed with chalk on the city’s pavement and walls. When some of these photographs were reproduced in March 1941, the photographer Ralph Steiner wrote, “Most photographers use their subject matter—nature, man, man’s work—as a means of showing how great they are rather than how wonderful the world is. No photographer with a great sense of his own importance would have taken these portraits of what goes on inside the minds of children.”