Photography has allowed Builder Levy to more intensely experience life, while participating in the process of making art that might change people’s (and his own) consciousness, toward the creation of a sustainable planet, no more wars, a world of peace, and justice for all!

Builder Levy’s gold-toned gelatin silver print and platinum print photographs intertwine social documentary, fine art, and street photography “to produce works of power and beauty.” —Naomi Rosenblum, noted photography art historian, from her essay Engaged with Life; Engaged with Art, Builder Levy Photographer.

Levy’ four photography books are:
Images of Appalachian Coalfields (1989), foreword by Cornell Capa
Builder Levy Photographer (2005), essay by Naomi Rosenblum
Appalachia USA (2014), foreword by Denise Giardina
Humanity in the Streets: New York City 1960s–1980s (2018), foreword by Deborah Willis

Fellowships, grants and commissions he received:
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2008)
Alicia Patterson Foundation (2004)
National Endowment of the Arts (1982)
Puffin Foundation (2004)
Furthermore publication grant (For Builder Levy Photographer ART Press)
Two commissions from the Appalachian College Association (1995 & 2002)

His work has been shown in more than 280 exhibitions, including more than 60 one-person shows. His work was included in SHEGO/HEGO/EGO – McEvoy Family Collection, Salon d’Honneur, Paris Photo 2018; Road To Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1968, High Museum of Art (2008); [Martin Luther] King in New York, Museum of the City of New York; Women and the Civil Rights Movement, Chrysler Museum of Art; Everyday Beauty, Smithsonian NMAAHC; Reckonings and Reconstructions, Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund, Georgia Museum of Art; A Long Arc— Photography and the American South Since 1845, High Museum of Art; AIPAD The Photography Show 2024 at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery, where nine Levy photographs were exhibited; The Art of the Platinum Print, Peter Fetterman Gallery; and Mongolia: Beyond Chinggis Khan, Rubin Museum of Art, NYC (a two-person show). In 2025, his work was included in American Jobs: 1940–2011, at the International Center of Photography (in NYC), and in a two year show, American Photographs, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from May 2025–May 2027. Levy’s photograph: I Am a Man Union Justice Now! will be included in a small permanent display on the civil rights movement, at The Obama Center and Museum in Chicago, when it opens in Chicago in 2026. Holland Cotter, Co-Chief Art Critic of the New York Times used this photograph and mentions Levy, in his New York Times review Images that Steered a Drive for Freedom in 2010, when the Road to Freedom exhibition was shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Levy’s one person exhibitions include: The Photography Show 2017, NYC — at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery booth — mentioned by Co-chief Art Critic Roberta Smith in her review in the New York Times of AIPAD’s annual NYC international exposition, noting Builder Levy’s civil rights and Appalachia photographs; Levy also had solo shows at the University of Kentucky Art Museum; West Virginia State Museum–The Cultural Center; Knoxville Museum of Art; Appalachian Museum, Berea College; and Doris Ulmann Galleries, Berea College. Levy’s show, Appalachia USA, spanning four decades of his work, opened at the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL in 2015, and traveled through 2/2024, including to the Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Tallahassee; Huntington Museum of Art, in WV; Miners Hall of Fame and Museum, Leadville, CO; Levy’s exhibition, Humanity in the Streets, was shown at the Brooklyn Historical Society in 2019. In 2024, his small Civil Rights & Peace exhibition and a large selection from his exhibit, Appalachia USA, were shown at the Carnegie Hall, Inc. Arts Center, in Lewisburg, WV.

His work is in more than 80 collections including that of Sir Elton John, The Nion McEvoy Family Collection, ICP, High Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Smithsonian NMAAHC, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of the City of New York, Huntington Museum of Art, The Do Good Fund; Bruce and Barbara Feldacker Labor Art Collection; Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Among those in the history of photography whose work inspired him to want to become a photographer were Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lewis Wicks Hine, Paul Strand, Roy DeCarava, Helen Levitt, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Eugene Atget.

He received a BA in Art (1964) from Brooklyn College, where he studied painting with Ad Reinhardt, art history with Milton Brown, and photography with Walter Rosenblum, a significant leader and president of the Photo League, who became a mentor and friend. Levy earned an MA in Art Education at NYU (1966). For a term paper for a required graduate education course, Levy did studies of the photography programs of the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.), that photographed rural America during the Depression; and the Harlem based photography group, Kamoinge Workshop, founded by Roy DeCarava and Lou Draper. Friendships with Paul Strand (with whom Levy lived for 10 days in 1973), and Helen Levitt, beginning in 1974, added insights to his role as an artist. Levy’s 34 1/2 years of working with adolescents, as a New York City Teacher, enriched his photography and his life.