About the Saul Leiter Foundation

The Saul Leiter Foundation, founded in 2014 under the direction of Margit Erb, is dedicated to preserving the art and legacy of the American photographer and painter Saul Leiter (1923–2013), and to the appreciation, advancement, and conservation of photographic works worldwide. The foundation maintains an archive of Leiter’s artwork and operates activities to promote the medium of photography through educational programs, lectures, exhibitions, cataloging, books, licensing, and other media. 

A primary goal is cataloging the work that Leiter left behind, which comprises thousands of prints, slides, negatives, and paintings. The SLF is working toward completing a catalogue raisonné to be made available for study by students, curators, writers, and art professionals. 

Lectures on Leiter’s life and work, and on archiving and general conservation techniques, are given by the foundation’s directors, in grade schools, high schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions. These lectures often accompany Leiter’s traveling exhibitions; recent talks have been held at the Photographers’ Gallery in London; FOMU in Antwerp, Belgium; Bunkamura in Tokyo; and the Itami City Museum of Art in Itami, Japan.

In 2018, the foundation began cataloging the tens of thousands of color slides in Leiter’s archive, with images dating as far back as 1948. Some of these discoveries have been shown as projections in the 2020 Japanese traveling exhibition Forever Saul Leiter, and in Aperture magazine’s spring 2021 “New York” issue. In 2022, 76 new color images from the slide archive were revealed in the monograph The Unseen Saul Leiter.

In 2023, SLF celebrated 100 years since Leiter’s birth with the book Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, which includes 340 images and five essays, and is available in a number of international editions.