Saul Leiter: A Portfolio

INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

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Opposite page: Saul Leiter, String,

ca. 1955, gelatin silver print,
9 34 x 9 34".

Above: Saul Leiter, Duchamp,

ca. 1952, gelatin silver print,
10 x 8".

So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes

whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a
silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. Its
very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands
and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so
hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I
will go backwards and forwards.
Virginia Woolf, November 28, 1928

IN 2006, AFTER A TEN-YEAR SEARCH for a publisher,

New Yorks Howard Greenberg Gallery persuaded
Steidl to issue Saul Leiters first book, Early Color.
This monograph, which has just reappeared in a

Left: Saul Leiter, Andy and

Mother, ca. 1950, gelatin
silver print, 7 x 5".

fourth edition, contains roughly eighty photographs

taken as color slides predominantly in the 1940s and
50s (with several dating from 1960). Retrieved by
Leiter only decades later, and nearly all printed for the
first time, the pictures emerged as a revelatory pageant.
As if by a flash of lightning, the book established Leiter,
born in 1923, as a pioneer of color photography, as
astute, avid, and inventive as any of his better-known
colleagues, contemporaries, and successors.
Leiters color photographs can seem at once reticent and ecstatic, playful and contemplative. Spanning
the years, they qualify, for this viewer, as the work
of a consummate termite artistManny Farbers

Above: Saul Leiter, Merce and

John, ca. 1952, gelatin silver print,
9 x 6".

unglamorous term for a quietly obsessive lone artist

nibbling away at a particular corner of experience,
nourished by curiosity and an ever-renewable capacity for aesthetic discovery. Signature Leiter moves
everywhere apparent in this portfolio of previously
unpublished picturesinclude shooting through
fog-blurred or rain-streaked windows, catching figures in shadow or from behind, focusing on hands
and feet rather than faces, integrating frames within
frames, allowing reflections and bold blurred shapes
to tangle and fill out the compositions.
Japanese prints and the paintings of Vuillard and
Bonnard have been invoked, with Leiters approval,
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The sense of dislocation in a Leiter

image, something like the photographic equivalent of Cubist fragmentation, accounts for the way his
pictures seem to jump forward in
time, appearing more contemporary
than they happen to be.

Saul Leiter, Soames, ca. 1969,

gelatin silver print, 7 x 5".

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as precursors for the photographers flattened spaces,

sharply angled perspectives, and muted, slashed, or
flame-like color. And you dont need a course on
Matisse or Manet to recognize the cleverness in using
bands and blocks of pure black to ignite a pictures
palettea standard Leiter strategy, singularly effective, and rare in early photographic color. Looking
closer to home, you might also see an affinity
between Leiters photos and the brilliant breezy layouts of Al Parker, the ace American illustrator who
introduced radical cropping and a near-abstract flatness into paintings adorning major magazines in the
years leading up to Leiters hit-and-miss career as a
fashion photographer.
There is, in any case, an inescapable element of
nostalgia adhering to the midcentury details caught
on the fly in his early color workin mens hats and
overcoats, sylphlike female silhouettes, window displays smoldering among shards of reflected street
signage. Were not accustomed to seeing this world
in color. The tug of nostalgia can even seem to reach
past the point of the photographs origins. Todd
Haynes has gone out of his way to credit Leiter as the
primary visual inspiration for his 2011 HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce [see, e.g., Amy Taubins interview with Haynes, Daughter Dearest, Artforum,
March 2011], though that story played out in the 30s,
a decade before the photographer took up a camera.
That said, the sense of dislocation in a Leiter image,
something like that evoked by Cubist collage and
fragmentation, also accounts for the way his pictures
can seem to jump forward in time, appearing more
contemporary than they happen to be. The images
on view here have been plucked from a cache of
recently retrieved color and black-and-white photos,
shot between the late 40s and late 60s but printed
only recently. In one modestly glorious image, from
around 1948, Philip Guston seems to have stepped in
from the subsequent decade to soap up a shopwindow
with a broad brush, creating a swirling AbEx cloud
that constitutes the photos thrilling main event.
This summer, Steidl is publishing Saul Leiter:
Early Black and White, a two-volume follow-up to
the photographers first book. Among the surprises
in this extraordinary array of newly exhumed works
is a distinctive psychological ingredient: Many
images focus on faces and seem more intimate, more
interior, than those in the previous collection, granting a more personal chronicle than Early Color
allowed. Sober and respectful portraits of Leiters
family, from the 40s, give way to more expressive
and antic character studies, including a range of selfportraits. The black-and-white pictures also reveal
that Leiterwho thinks of himself as a painter no
less than as a photographerstood in close proximity
to major artists of his generation, friends and acquain-

tances who aggressively made their mark while

Leiter was barely getting by. Leiter photographed
Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Andy Warhol
and his mother (around 1950, when Warhol was a
fledgling fashion illustrator, newly arrived in New
York), Lotte Lenya, and (only the title cues us to his
identity) a seemingly anonymous man hunched in a
caf, his back to the camera, a hat crowning his head:
Marcel Duchamp. Theres also a particularly strong
image of W. Eugene Smith, circa 1950, looking as
tightly wound as a convict contemplating a prison
break, and a picture of a careworn Diane Arbus,
circa 1970, roughly a year before her suicide.
Perhaps the most surprising of the early blackand-white pictures are a number of nudes that are also
portraits. In the best of them, the interaction between
photographer and subject implies an absolute intimacy. Paul Strands remarkable portraits of his wife
Rebecca, taken during the 20s, share a similar charge
of candor and complicity, but there arent that many
other precedents for these nudes, which also display
a refreshing teasing quality, receptiveness measured
by alternating currents of vulnerability and sass. In
1960, Leiter settled into something approximating
domestic bliss with a painter and erstwhile fashion
model named Soames Bantry. (Until her death in
2002, they resided in separate apartments at the same
East Village address where Leiter still lives.) Soamess
long, folded body occupies a shadow-streaked bed
in one of the most abstract of Leiters nudes, Soames,
ca. 1969, which appears on this page.
Having weathered decades of neglect, Leiter can
be forgiven for appearing strenuously wary and selfdeprecating in Tomas Leachs 2012 documentary, In
No Great Hurry, throughout which this modern master keeps insisting hes not a fit subject for a film. The
fact remains that Leiter, nearing ninety, exemplifies
a life of heroic steadfastness, and his late-blooming
career happens to be really taking off. More books are
forthcoming; his first full-career retrospective, organized by Deichtorhallen Hamburg and recently on
view at Kunst Haus Wien, travels to Fotografie
Forum Frankfurt in spring 2014, and a show including newly printed color photographs is currently on
view at Fifty One gallery in Antwerp (through July
13), soon to be joined by an exhibition of his paintings and photographs at HackleBury Fine Art,
London (June 6July 27).
So the days pass, and Saul Leiters alert eye and
belatedly emerging body of work continue to distill
the perceptual clatter, the daily parade of impressions and feelings, the hypnotic bright quick things
that only a very gifted artist can catch and describe.
Just look.
MICHAEL ALMEREYDA IS A NEW YORKBASED WRITER
AND FILMMAKER. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

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Saul Leiter, Circles, ca. 1949,

C-print, 14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, Pipes, ca. 1960,

C-print, 14 x 11".

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Saul Leiter, Auto, ca. 1960, C-print,

14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, Mannequin, ca. 1952,

C-print, 14 x 11".

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Saul Leiter, Mr., ca. 1958, C-print,

14 x 11".
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Saul Leiter, Red Curtain, ca. 1956,

C-print, 14 x 11".
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Saul Leiter, L & L Dairy, ca. 1949,

C-print, 14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, Painted, ca. 1948,

C-print, 14 x 11".

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Saul Leiter, Black and White,

ca. 1949, C-print, 14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, Menu, Paris, 1959,

C-print, 14 x 11".

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Saul Leiter, Ant, ca. 1950, C-print,

11 x 14".

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