Saul Leiter: A Portfolio

INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

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 Opposite page: Saul Leiter, String, Above: Saul Leiter, Duchamp,
ca. 1955, gelatin silver print, ca. 1952, gelatin silver print,
9 3⁄4 x 9 3⁄4". 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. It’s
very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial per-
haps. 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 York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery persuaded
Steidl to issue Saul Leiter’s first book, Early Color.
This monograph, which has just reappeared in a
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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.
Leiter’s color photographs can seem at once reti-
cent and ecstatic, playful and contemplative. Spanning
the years, they qualify, for this viewer, as the work
of a consummate “termite artist”—Manny Farber’s
Left: Saul Leiter, Andy and Above: Saul Leiter, Merce and
Mother, ca. 1950, gelatin John, ca. 1952, gelatin silver print,
silver print, 7 x 5". 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 capac-
ity for aesthetic discovery. Signature Leiter moves—
everywhere apparent in this portfolio of previously
unpublished pictures—include shooting through
fog-blurred or rain-streaked windows, catching fig-
ures 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 Leiter’s approval,
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 The sense of dislocation in a Leiter
image, something like the photo-
graphic equivalent of Cubist frag-
mentation, 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 photographer’s flattened spaces,
sharply angled perspectives, and muted, slashed, or
flame-like color. And you don’t need a course on
Matisse or Manet to recognize the cleverness in using
bands and blocks of pure black to ignite a picture’s
palette—a standard Leiter strategy, singularly effec-
tive, and rare in early photographic color. Looking
closer to home, you might also see an affinity
between Leiter’s photos and the brilliant breezy lay-
outs of Al Parker, the ace American illustrator who
introduced radical cropping and a near-abstract flat-
ness into paintings adorning major magazines in the
years leading up to Leiter’s 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 work—in men’s hats and
overcoats, sylphlike female silhouettes, window dis-
plays smoldering among shards of reflected street
signage. We’re 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 mini-
series, Mildred Pierce [see, e.g., Amy Taubin’s inter-
view 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 photo’s thrilling main event.
This summer, Steidl is publishing Saul Leiter:
Early Black and White, a two-volume follow-up to
the photographer’s 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, grant-
ing a more personal chronicle than Early Color
allowed. Sober and respectful portraits of Leiter’s
family, from the ’40s, give way to more expressive
and antic character studies, including a range of self-
portraits. The black-and-white pictures also reveal
that Leiter—who thinks of himself as a painter no
less than as a photographer—stood 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
café, his back to the camera, a hat crowning his head:
Marcel Duchamp. There’s 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 black-
and-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 inti-
macy. Paul Strand’s remarkable portraits of his wife
Rebecca, taken during the ’20s, share a similar charge
of candor and complicity, but there aren’t 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.) Soames’s
long, folded body occupies a shadow-streaked bed
in one of the most abstract of Leiter’s nudes, Soames,
ca. 1969, which appears on this page.
Having weathered decades of neglect, Leiter can
be forgiven for appearing strenuously wary and self-
deprecating in Tomas Leach’s 2012 documentary, In
No Great Hurry, throughout which this modern mas-
ter keeps insisting he’s 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, orga-
nized by Deichtorhallen Hamburg and recently on
view at Kunst Haus Wien, travels to Fotografie
Forum Frankfurt in spring 2014, and a show includ-
ing 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 paint-
ings and photographs at HackleBury Fine Art,
London (June 6–July 27).
So the days pass, and Saul Leiter’s alert eye and
belatedly emerging body of work continue to distill
the perceptual clatter, the daily parade of impres-
sions and feelings, the hypnotic bright quick things
that only a very gifted artist can catch and describe.
Just look.
MICHAEL ALMEREYDA IS A NEW YORK–BASED WRITER
AND FILMMAKER. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
5/22/13 4:27 PM
 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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