Levitan was born in Johannesburg where he graduated as an architect in the 1950s. He moved to Cape Town in the late 1970s where he worked as an architect in the design of housing where they used photography to research people and their spaces. He then moved on to work at the urban problems research unit at UCT and produced a book with photographs called "Black Housing in the Western Cape".
In 1984 a fellow architect started to publish the ADA magazine (Architecture, Design and Art) in which he did most of the photography, which included events photography, buildings, places. The special edition they did on Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, gave him his appreciation for the diversity of South African cites and small towns like Hanover in the Karoo.
He is now working fulltime as a photographer and has had work published in De Kat, House and Leisure, Style, Architect, Architect and Builder and the World Architecture.