Biography

“The problem with my paintings is this: I don’t do a painting all at once.” It’s the spring of 2013, and Saul Leiter is in his studio with his friend and gallery representative Margit Erb, holding up some of his earliest abstract watercolors, made in the mid-1940s when he first moved to New York. Erb is filming the proceedings. “I begin a painting, then I put it away,” Leiter goes on. “Sometimes I change it. Sometimes I forget about it. Sometimes I open up a portfolio and rework it. You see, the fact that I started a painting doesn’t mean that I finished it.”

Leiter, sitting by his huge picture window, surrounded by art supplies, coffee cups, and precariously stacked boxes of his photographic prints, seems to enjoy examining his old works. Indeed they are beautiful, all color and pattern and undulating shapes. He laughs, recalling that his longtime friend and colleague Henry Wolf preferred the paint-speckled backs of his paintings to the sides that Leiter intended for viewers to look at.

Leiter leans toward Erb’s camera, his face lighting up with mischief. He lifts a swirling red-and-white painting and says that Willem de Kooning liked this one “because the toilet paper that I was drying the paint with stuck to the thing, and I left it that way.” He’s talking now about the early 1950s, when he moved eastward from Greenwich Village and found himself interacting with the illuminati of New York’s early Abstract Expressionist movement, at the Tanager Gallery near his new East Village home and at the other famous 10th Street galleries, whose influential reign would largely conclude in the early ’60s.

“I don’t know why I signed some paintings and not others,” Leiter says. “I wasn’t too sure of the value of my work—although I can’t pretend to have felt that it had no value. I didn’t have that kind of secure feeling about my work that some people have, who are convinced they’re great geniuses.”

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh on December 3, 1923. Reaching back generations, almost all of his paternal male ancestors had devoted themselves to Orthodox Judaism. Of the celebrated rabbi Wolf Leiter’s three sons, Saul, the second born, was considered the most likely to succeed his powerful father, given his innate intelligence and charisma, along with his ability to easily memorize passages from the Talmud. For years, young Saul tried to fulfill a destiny that had been decided for him. In the late 1930s he studied at the Talmudical Academy in New York City, and in the early ’40s, after spending a semester at the University of Pittsburgh, he briefly attended the Telshe Yeshiva Rabbinical College near Cleveland. Yet it simply wasn’t to be.

“I am the son of a rabbi, the grandson of a rabbi,” Leiter said to Erb, who is now the director of the Saul Leiter Foundation. “I come from a family with hundreds of years of tradition in the religious business. And for some mysterious reason I turned away from it.”

Was this a mystery? Not necessarily—Leiter was captivated by other things, namely art, which started enchanting him as a teenager. He asked his mother, Regina, for a camera, and she gave him an affordable, easy-to-use Detrola. Leiter’s photographs from his teen years tend to include his family—especially his beloved younger sister, Deborah—often on their porch in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Still, throughout his life Leiter called painting his first love. During his stint at the Talmudical Academy, he was inspired by visiting a friend’s girlfriend and finding that she painted. “I bought some art supplies,” Leiter said, “which at the time were inexpensive. And I made a very rough copy of a Vermeer.” Leiter would laugh while recounting the story of bringing his Vermeer to a shop to be framed, and later finding that it had been stolen. “I must admit that I felt a sense of pride,” he told Sam Stourdzé in an interview for the 2008 Steidl book Saul Leiter.

Experiences at the University of Pittsburgh—though not in the classroom—proved formative as well. “I spent two summers in the library at the university,” Leiter told Erb. “I would sit there from morning till night, going through books.” He elaborated to Stourdzé: “I looked at everything. I liked everything. I discovered a new world. One day it was Greek sculpture; the next it was African sculpture; later, Peruvian textile. No one explained anything to me. No one taught me anything. It was my education.” Leiter’s autodidactic habits never left him; ever curious, he would forever be something of an art-world encyclopedia.

In 1946, in his early twenties, Leiter left Pittsburgh and relocated to New York City, where he would live for the rest of his life. He’d enjoyed a taste of success by this time, having exhibited paintings at the Ten-Thirty Gallery in Cleveland and at the Arts & Crafts Center in Pittsburgh. “I came to New York to get away from home,” he said. “I’ve often been described as coming to New York to be a painter. That’s not quite true. I was very unhappy at home. My family was not sympathetic to anything I did. I wanted to get away, and finally one night I left.”

Stepping off his preordained path toward the rabbinate caused his father to disown him and would forever limit Leiter’s contact with the rest of his family. On top of that, breaking free of his family’s suffocating expectations meant that Saul Leiter would never again let anyone tell him how to live his life. As he said in the 2008 Steidl book, and often over the years, “The notion of being left in peace, alone, is quite an appealing one.”

In New York with minimal funds, Leiter spent a few nights sleeping in Central Park, but soon he rented an apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. He had an aunt in Brooklyn, and he kept in touch with his mother back home, who remained his lifeline. “She used to worry about me,” Leiter said. “She was concerned about keeping me afloat. And she kept me afloat for a long time.”

Leiter was introduced to the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart (born 1916), who was experimenting with photography and who encouraged his young friend’s growing interest in the medium, himself becoming a frequent subject of Saul’s early black-and-white photographs. “I began to think of photography as something that would allow me to earn a living,” Leiter explained. Pousette-Dart also helped to nudge along Leiter’s painting career, showing his work to the gallerist and dealer Betty Parsons. “She offered me a show, but she wanted me to frame my pictures,” Leiter said. “I was in one of my, shall we say, depressed periods, and I had very little money. And for some reason which I will never understand, I did not do it. It could have been a nice thing—I could have become part of the early Abstract Expressionist movement!”

This wouldn’t be the last time that, for whatever reason, Leiter neglected to answer the door when opportunity knocked. “Just a few days ago I found a letter that I had slipped into a book,” he told Sam Stourdzé. “It remained there for about thirty years. I opened it—it was an invitation to participate in an exhibition.”

In the late 1940s, Leiter started taking photographs using color slide film such as Kodachrome, eventually amassing a wide body of work comprising images captured on daily walks close to home. (He kept shooting in black and white as well.) To share the pictures with friends, he would project them on the wall of his apartment. Meanwhile, he continued to paint on paper with water-based paints—only his earliest efforts were oil on canvas—and showed work in the New Year Show at the Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio (1946), and the Abstract and Surrealist American Art exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (1947). In 1951, Life magazine published two sets of photographs that remain among Leiter’s most enduring and intriguing black-and-white images, Wedding as a Funeral and Shoes of the Shoeshine Man. Although Leiter didn’t consider himself a conceptual artist, both of these series put a sly twist on everyday subject matter, the former reframing a celebration as more of a lament, and the latter focusing attention on the footwear of the men who are paid to care for other people’s shoes.

Around this time Leiter befriended the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith (born 1918), who likewise encouraged his creative efforts and who is the subject of several tender Leiter portraits. Smith suggested that Leiter meet with the photographer and curator Edward Steichen. “Steichen noticed I had holes in my loafers,” Leiter said with a laugh in the 2008 Steidl book, “but nevertheless included me in the [1953] exhibition Always the Young Strangers at the MoMA.” This was an eventful period; Leiter had moved to East 10th Street in 1952 and was roaming the fringes of the booming gallery scene in the area, working for a time in the studio behind the Tanager Gallery nearby, where he showed paintings and drawings. Leiter married Barbara Hatch in 1954, and the couple separated in 1959, divorcing soon after.

In 1957, as a way to earn money with his camera, Leiter took his first fashion photographs, for art director Henry Wolf at Esquire magazine. The following year Wolf succeeded the influential Alexey Brodovitch as art director at Harper’s Bazaar, and Leiter’s commercial career expanded rapidly. Though his earliest fashion work was in black and white, Leiter placed color images in the magazine starting in the February 1959 issue. Along with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Hiro, Leiter would dominate the pages of Harper’s Bazaar for years, shooting multiple covers and traveling frequently on commercial assignments.

Leiter rented a commercial studio on Fifth Avenue starting in the early 1960s, and did work for magazines including Elle, Nova, and British Vogue in addition to Harper’s Bazaar, shooting in Ireland, the U.K., France, Spain, Italy, and Mexico. His fashion photographs share many of the same qualities of his personal work, including dramatic compositions, the clever and sometimes disorienting use of reflection, and, perhaps above all, an inspired harnessing of the spontaneity that can only be found by working in the street and incorporating its unpredictable energy. Indeed, as Leiter told the British art historian Martin Harrison in the 1991 book Appearances, “I had the hope that the result would look like a photograph rather than a fashion photograph, that occasionally something else was going on there.”

In the 1970s, confronted with increasingly vocal art directors—“and their assistants, and their assistants’ assistants,” as Leiter would often recall—the artist decided he’d had enough of being told how to take a picture. He packed up his cameras and left the commercial world altogether, and in 1981 the city of New York closed his studio due to the nonpayment of taxes. “There are people who sacrifice everything for success,” Leiter told the writer Vince Aletti in an onstage interview at New York’s School of Visual Arts in May 2013. “I didn’t feel that way. I attached more importance to the idea that there might be someone who might love me and whom I might love.”

By now Leiter had been living since the 1960s, in separate apartments in the same building, with Soames Bantry, a model and fellow painter he’d met in the late ’50s. They traveled together, and Leiter featured Bantry in several commercial shoots, including a 1971 series for Nova in Ireland, before her modeling career wound down. Back at home they listened to music and discussed each other’s paintings, and Leiter shot dozens of portraits of her through the years, with Bantry taking on different personas for his camera. “We wasted ourselves in happy foolishness,” Leiter said in Kehrer’s 2012 book Saul Leiter: Retrospektive. “We stumbled through life together and the spectacle of this rather odd couple sometimes amused friends and even strangers.” Bantry died in 2002. “I continue to live with her paintings,” Leiter said. “They are a source of pleasure to me. I have never grown tired of them.” 

In the 1970s Leiter and Henry Wolf began discussing the idea of making a book of Leiter’s black-and-white nudes, which Leiter had been taking as far back as the mid-’40s but had shown to almost no one. Although it turned out that the project would not be realized in Leiter’s lifetime, the artist took to his darkroom and printed thousands of his nudes and intimate portraits. The subjects of these images are the women in his life, his friends and lovers. Leiter collaborates with the women as equals, empowering them to express themselves freely and reveal their unique character. The photographs are usually simple and direct, with some being quite playful and others more serious. As with his street photography, Leiter didn’t exert control over the proceedings but rather let things unfold naturally as he paid close attention and reacted with his camera.

With the planned book of nudes not taking shape and his commercial career having ended abruptly, Leiter entered a quiet period that would last for decades, yet there would be no pause in his daily habit of painting and taking pictures; those activities were as familiar and as necessary to him as breathing and, not far behind, drinking coffee. And so, with stacks of prints before him and more time than ever on his hands, Leiter embarked on a new project that would combine his artistic loves: the painted nude. Leiter had done earlier experiments in applying water-based paints to his own darkroom prints, but when he began specifically using his nudes, the idea for a new and vital type of series really took hold.

These works, anthologized in the 2015 Sylph Editions book Painted Nudes, are unique in the Leiter oeuvre, merging the representational and the abstract, the colorful and the monochromatic. With photographs taken as early as the 1940s and printed largely in the ’70s, and afterward painted on at various points over the following twenty years, these creations highlight Leiter’s penchant for returning over time to his painted works. Speaking with Margit Erb about his habit of touching up old casein paintings with gouache, Leiter said, “I tend to do things that one shouldn’t do.

“Everything is unfinished,” Leiter added. “You can never finish anything, even though sometimes the things that are unfinished are spoiled because you worked too much on them. But that’s part of what painting is all about. Sometimes you have to keep for yourself the right to spoil things.” Fortunately, Leiter left behind hundreds of very much unspoiled painted nudes, many of them found after his death between the pages of various books in his library, which comprised thousands of volumes.

In the early 1990s, the tides began to turn for Saul Leiter, and no small amount of credit goes to the legendary portrait and fashion photographer Richard Avedon. As the author and curator Jane Livingston was nearing completion of her 1992 book, The New York School: Photographs 1936–1963, Avedon, one of her primary subjects, suggested she take a look at Leiter’s work. (Leiter and Avedon were acquaintances and shared a mutual respect.) This set off a series of events that led to Leiter’s inclusion in the book—a major boon during a time of career obscurity and financial difficulty—and, perhaps even more important, his being introduced to the gallerist Howard Greenberg, at Livingston’s recommendation.

“Saul talked in circles and liked to push and prod you,” Greenberg told Michael Diemar in The Classic Magazine in 2019, recounting his first visit to Leiter’s apartment. “He was a really unusual and interesting guy. He handed me an old photo paper box, covered in dust. I opened it and looked at about thirty black-and-white prints. They were fantastic, amazing photographs, amazing prints. I knew right away that I wanted to work with him. I had no idea at that point that he made color pictures.” Leiter’s work was first shown at Howard Greenberg Gallery, then located in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, in 1993, and around that time Leiter began making color prints with Philippe Laumont of Laumont Editions.

In 1996, Margit Erb assumed responsibility for overseeing Leiter’s career at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Erb and Leiter became fast friends and worked well together, and as the gallery continued to show Leiter’s prints, the idea of a book of color photographs gathered steam.

Still, there were considerable delays. The prospective book, which would be Leiter’s very first monograph, passed through the hands of two publishing companies before the German photography imprint Steidl got involved around 2004. Early Color, edited by Leiter’s longtime associate Martin Harrison, was released in January 2006, coinciding with an exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery, which had since relocated to 57th Street in midtown Manhattan. The response was overwhelming. “We started getting calls immediately, from people who had clearly never called a gallery in their lives and just wanted more information on this person,” Erb says today. “There was no Saul Leiter website; there was very little information on him online. Those were really exciting moments. Then the sales started.”

Early Color’s quick success lifted Leiter out of the dire financial straits he was in. “This is an artist who went from making two or three sales a year to making two or three sales a week,” Erb recalls.

“I don’t understand the belittling of color,” Leiter said in a 2002 talk at the Jewish Museum in New York. “I think it’s an important ingredient in life and it has an honorable place in photography.” Yet color photography had long been looked down upon as ephemeral and more suitable for advertising and commerce, compared with the more seriously considered realm of monochrome. Now, though, Erb was receiving inquiries from “collectors who had never, ever considered adding color photography to their collection. And around that time a lot of major museums were adding work by color photographers.

“It’s hard to believe now, but the gallery world was holding on for a long time to just purely black and white,” Erb adds. “We knew Joel Meyerowitz, we knew Americans who were working with color in the ’70s. But here comes someone who was doing color—not commercially, but for purely artistic purposes—thirty years beforehand.”

Leiter’s “little book,” as he liked to describe it (“His one requirement was that it could fit on the small table by his bed,” Erb says), shows the masterful use of a muted color palette and depicts a quieter and more mysterious New York than the brash, frenetic city found in most artists’ visions. “I like ambiguity in a photograph,” Leiter told Sam Stourdzé. “I like it when one is not certain of what one sees.” Early Color bursts with images that temporarily confuse the eye, slowing down the viewer into a more mindful, meditative state where nothing is taken for granted. Fields of solid color may dominate a photograph, at least at first, before certain trenchant details emerge.

Wet windows, snow scenes, and dancing umbrellas disembodied from those who hold them are recurring Leiter motifs. “I like photographing through things,” Leiter said at the Jewish Museum, in reference to Early Color’s cover image, Through Boards (1958). “I like things that are lost in a fuzz or in a mist, photographs taken through glass.” One can hear whispers of Leiter’s favorite painters—Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such as Bonnard, Vuillard, and Degas—who influenced his camera work more than other photographers did.

As Early Color was quickly adding a new voice to the conversation about color photography, Leiter had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2006, followed by his first in Europe, at Paris’s Fondation Cartier-Bresson in 2008. Now well into his eighties, Leiter, accompanied by Erb, traveled to the openings of these shows and savored his newfound success, posing for photos before a rapturous press corps and giving brilliant, highly entertaining—if typically a bit digressive—talks and lectures.

The last years of his life brought a contentment that had previously eluded Leiter, as he saw his acclaim continue to spread and it became clear that in Erb he’d found a worthy shepherd for his archive and legacy. Still, he wasn’t necessarily surprised by his new position. “I always knew I was good at what I did,” Leiter told Vince Aletti in New York in 2013. “I have been described as being modest. But in spite of being modest, I’m aware that I am whatever it is that I am.” Here modesty nonetheless prevented Leiter from acknowledging in so many words that his work had entered the canon of important and influential mid-twentieth-century photography.

In 2009, Leiter held his first painting exhibition in over thirty years, at New York’s Knoedler Gallery. In 2012, a career-spanning exhibition of photographs and paintings, Saul Leiter: Retrospektive, was launched at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg, Germany, with Leiter attending the opening. (In the subsequent years Retrospektive would go on to travel to Vienna, Frankfurt, Munich, London, and Antwerp, among other European cities.) At this time Leiter was assembling the two-volume book Early Black & White for Steidl, which would be published in 2014.

The public got a rare peek inside Leiter’s world with the release of the director Tomas Leach’s feature-length 2013 documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter. For the film, the notoriously private artist, who after the post–Early Color media blitz was already growing weary of being interviewed, granted Leach unprecedented access, with his sole condition being that the director work alone, without a crew or even an assistant.

In October 2013 Leiter was diagnosed with cancer, and after a mercifully brief illness, supported by Erb and other close friends, he passed away peacefully at his East Village home on November 26, just days before his ninetieth birthday. As a fitting tribute, New York Magazine put his circa 1960 photograph Package on the cover of its “Reasons to Love New York” issue in December of that year. The following spring, Leiter’s friends, colleagues, and admirers gathered at Florence Gould Hall in midtown Manhattan for a memorial ceremony. They listened to audio recordings of Leiter holding court on some of his favorite topics, and the artist was honored deeply and warmly, with lots of laughs, by speakers including gallerists Roger Szmulewicz and Howard Greenberg, printer Philippe Laumont, and, of course, Margit Erb. In August 2014, Erb officially founded the Saul Leiter Foundation.

Art lovers and the creative community have continued to embrace Leiter since his death. It seems that sympathetic souls the world over have responded to his fondness for elevating simple, everyday moments, for depicting beauty over ugliness; they have seen reflected in his images the Zen-like wisdom he imparted when he said, in the 2008 Steidl book, “One of the things photography has allowed me is to take pleasure in looking.” Leiter’s boundary-pushing visual style has been especially inspiring for filmmakers, including the directors Todd Haynes, Sam Mendes, Lili Horvát, and Oren Moverman.

After gaining popularity in Europe, most fervently in France and Germany, Leiter had his first solo exhibition in Asia, Photographer Saul Leiter: A Retrospective, which opened in April 2017 at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo and then traveled to several other venues in Japan. The show struck a chord with the Japanese public, as did its accompanying book, All About Saul Leiter, published by Seigensha and later issued in international editions in France, Spain, and South Korea. (Leiter himself was a great admirer of Japanese art, and some of his work bears its influence.) A second large traveling exhibition, Forever Saul Leiter, opened at Bunkamura less than three years later, in January 2020, along with a book by the same name from Shogakukan. And in 2018, around forty years after the idea was hatched by Leiter and his friend Henry Wolf, Leiter’s book of nudes and intimate portraits finally came to light in Steidl’s In My Room.

The Saul Leiter Foundation continues to assemble a catalogue raisonné of Leiter’s enormous archive, proving that the artist wasn’t joking when he told Margit Erb that the world had seen “just the tip of the iceberg.” Thrilling new discoveries abound, illuminating fresh aspects of Leiter’s personal and commercial explorations. In 2022, the foundation released the book The Unseen Saul Leiter, featuring 76 images from the roughly 60,000 color slides that Leiter left behind, and in 2023 celebrated Leiter’s hundredth birthday with the career-spanning coffee-table book Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective. A new traveling European exhibition by diChroma photography was launched at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in 2023 as well.

“There is such a thing as indecent obsession with productivity,” Leiter told Erb in 2013. Although he was famously suspicious of ambition, Leiter was nothing if not productive—but what we make of his work is up to us. “I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who said that one could spend a lifetime explaining the quality of a work of art and not really deal with it properly,” Leiter said at New York’s Jewish Museum in 2002. “I don’t believe in explaining what I do. I took the kind of photographs I took because I liked what I saw.”