In the first half of the 20th century, photographers shot in black and white. Of course, 35mm color film didn’t come onto the scene until Kodak released Kodachrome in 1935. Serious photographers shot in black and white. To shoot color was amateurish, and by the late 1940s, Saul Leiter was making color photographs of New York City. Over several decades, Leiter created a vision of the city through the most unlikely of moments. He passed on Tuesday, Nov. 26, and left behind a body of work that has a beautiful quietude, despite the nature of its metropolitan subject.
Born in 1923, Leiter originally studied to become a rabbi, but he abandoned that in 1946 when he moved to New York City to become a painter. Once there, Leiter met and worked with Richard Pousette-Dart, an Abstract Expressionist painter, who urged him to take up photography, much to his family’s chagrin. His earliest shots were in black and white, but that changed in 1948 when he started shooting in color.
Leiter’s photographs are unique in their seemingly fleeting nature. The tones are warm, the focus is soft, and the composition is painterly. In “Snow“, a photograph from 1960, a man is visible through a frosted pane that has been partially wiped, giving a somewhat clear view of the man. His lower half is obscured by streaks and frost. A yellow truck sits across the street, and to the left of the man in the midground is a person completely obscured by the frost. This photograph could easily have been a painting that would have adorned the wall of a museum.
Many of his photographs did make it into galleries and museums. In 1953, Edward Steichen featured some of Leiter’s photographs in “Always the Young Strangers”, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art where Steichen was the director of the museum’s photography department. In 1955, Steichen curated “The Family of Man”, an exhibition at MoMA that featured 503 photographs from over two million, and he asked Leiter to feature some of his work. Leiter declined.
His work rose to prominence in recent years with a series of books and exhibitions. In 2005, his early color photographs were featured in the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and a book titled “Saul Leiter: Early Color” followed in 2006. His life and work were chronicled in “In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter”, a documentary that is currently making the rounds in film festivals across the world.
With a roll of Kodachrome and a camera, Leiter captured beauty in the commonplace. People are either the subject of his photographs or elements of the composition. Nothing is taken for granted in Leiter’s work, even the out-of-focus elements. A photographer with a painter’s sensibility, Saul Leiter left behind a largely unprinted body of work. Hopefully, more of his work will find its way into galleries and museums, so that the rest of us can see New York City in a new way.
Rest in peace, Saul.
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Sources: NYTimes, Wikipedia, Gallery51, Flo Peters Gallery
