The American artist Saul Leiter (1923–2013) became enchanted by painting and photography as a teenager in Pittsburgh. After he relocated to New York City in 1946, his visionary imagination and tireless devotion to artistic practice pushed him to become one of the iconic photographers of the mid-twentieth century. An innate sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student of art of all kinds, and he retained his spirit of exploration and spontaneity throughout his long career, in both his fashion images and his personal work.
Leiter began experimenting with color photography in New York in the late 1940s, using slide film such as Kodachrome. The 2006 release of his first monograph, Early Color, revealed radically innovative compositions and a groundbreaking mastery of color that permanently changed the history of photography. Though Leiter sometimes defended the use of color in fine-art photography, he refused to analyze or explain his own work. “I don’t have a philosophy,” Leiter said. “I have a camera.”
Leiter’s prolific work in black and white, much of which he printed himself, reveals an equally bold compositional style, often flipping the focus from foreground to background and playing with the dynamics of shadow and reflection. Like Leiter’s color photographs, these images mine intrigue and emotion from everyday settings. “A photographer’s gift to the viewer is sometimes beauty in the overlooked ordinary,” Leiter said.
Though Leiter is recognized primarily for his photography, he called painting his first love. He maintained a lifelong habit of painting daily and produced thousands of colorful works on paper, the majority of them abstract, using water-based paints. Among his primary influences were Japanese woodblock artists and French Impressionists such as Bonnard and Vuillard. “Photography is about finding things,” Leiter said. “Painting is different. It’s about making something.”
The Saul Leiter Foundation, founded in 2014, maintains an archive of Leiter’s artwork and operates activities to promote the medium of photography through educational programs, lectures, exhibitions, books, licensing, and other media. A primary goal is cataloging the work that Leiter left behind, which comprises tens of thousands of prints, slides, negatives, and paintings.
