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Earl y Co lor
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https ://archive.org/details/saulleiterearlycOO0Oleit
Canopy, 1958
SAGE IIB IMER
Ege (Colheie

With an introduction by Martin Harrison

Steid|
le, |25
 Saul Leiter: Early Color 1948-1960

Saul Leiter’s vision is founded on a rapid eye for absorbing spontaneous events.
Confronted by a dense web of data, fleeting moments in space and time, he
employs an array of strategies — oblique framings, complex intersecting planes
and ambiguous reflections — to distil an urban visual poetry that is by turns
deeply affectionate, edgy and breathtakingly poignant. He takes risks — flouting
conventions of camera technique and apparently indifferent to the limits of the
light-gathering capacity of emulsions.

The photographer of ‘found’ or ‘street’ imagery, as opposed to contrived

tableaux, is required to deal with many givens. Yet Leiter’s enframings in Early
Color consistently re-present incidents which may be characterized by their
calm introspection as much as by their tension, psychological or otherwise.
He seems to achieve this by a mysterious process of beguilement. Rather
than imposing himself on situations he seeps, unobtrusively, into life’s unfolding
dramas; still, today, to observe him at work in Downtown New York remains an
education in how photographers can avoid drawing attention to themselves.

The origins of the semi-mythological phenomenon the ‘New York street

photographer’ may be traced back to coincide closely with Leiter’s arrival in
New York in 1946. This moment in New York's cultural history may appear,
with hindsight, as a brief, if buoyant, hiatus, before its spirit was partly blunted
by conservative politicians. But Leiter’s sensibility set his photographs apart from
some of the defining characteristics of the putative ‘New York School’ — as typified
by the visceral encounters with the pulse and anxieties of street life familiar from
the 1950s imagery of photographers such as Robert Frank and William Klein.
Leiter, by contrast, operated in a more reflective, less overtly confrontational
mode, seeking out tranquility in the Manhattan maelstrom. He transformed
ostensibly banal or unpropitious subject matter into a unique urban pastoral.
There were partial exceptions, such as D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable Daybreak
Express, a valediction to the Third Avenue elevated railroad (the El), and the
street photographs of Helen Levitt, but none of his contemporaries assembled
a comparably extensive body of work in color. And although Leiter was adept
in black and white — indeed in certain formal and technical respects he was
arguably more radical in monochrome — the lyricism of his photographs is most
acutely manifested in the eloquent interplay of colors.

Among the seminal events that acted as catalysts for New York’s young
photographers in the 1940s were the publication of André Kertész’s Day of Paris
(1945) and the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
(1947). Like the friendship he struck up with W. Eugene Smith, they also served
to strengthen Leiter’s resolve, nudging his already strong inclinations toward
unconventional ways of seeing. Yet ultimately his interpretations of reality are
redolent of the European intimism of the painters Bonnard and Vuillard, artists
he greatly admires, as much as the work of any photographer; he shares, too, the
French artists’ inspiration from the asymmetry and radical cropping of Japanese art.
Picture Frame, Rome, 1959
A specific art-historical analogue that might be proposed here is Vuillard’s pastel
study Le Métro: ‘Station Villiers’ (1917, Musée du Prieuré, Saint-Germain-en-Laye),
which translates an essentially modern, industrial subject into romantically delicate
washes of color.

Saul was born in Pittsburgh in 1923, son of the internationally renowned Talmudic
scholar, Wolf Leiter. He was intended for the Rabbinate, but in the teeth of
strong paternal opposition abandoned Cleveland Theological College in 1946
and moved to New York, intending to become a painter. The majority of his
paintings explore a fundamentally abstract language of flat planes of color;
to the extent that they contain a representational element it is described in a
spontaneous, delicately wandering line, suggestive of here a landscape, here
perhaps a figure. Formally, his palette is as expressive as it is unusual, a dialogue
between vibrancy and restraint in a secondary range of hues, from muted violets
and mauves to evanescent ochres or yellows. And it will become evident from
Early Color that these descriptions are almost equally applicable to the ambiance
of his photographs, as exemplified, for instance, by the spare geometrical under-
pinning of Mondrian Worker (1954) or the restrained, pastel shades of Tanager
Steps (1952).

Soon after Leiter's arrival in New York, his paintings began to be exhibited, mainly
in the Lower East Side galleries such as the Tanager Gallery, where they could be
seen alongside those of Philip Guston, Philip Pearlstein and Willem de Kooning;
ea, IP S7
inexplicably, they were never commercially successful, despite attracting the
intermittent interest of influential critics. He was introduced to the abstract
expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting in the
darkroom with portrait photographs which, as Leiter succinctly described,
involved manipulation of the negatives, ‘blown up large, bleached and printed
soft-focus, in the style of Julia Margaret Cameron.’ In one of the paradoxes
typical of Leiter’s life, it was, therefore, his friendship with a painter (Pousette-
Dart) that proved to be a significant trigger for his recognition of the creative
potential of photography.

Although he has never ceased painting, Leiter’s camera became — like an

extension of his arm and mind — an ever-present tool, the offbeat chronicler of
metropolitan scenes, which occasionally he found in Europe, as well as in the
United States. If his initial essays into photography were exclusively in black
and white, to some extent this was dictated by financial considerations. But
he was also, as he recalls it, ‘afraid’ of the responsibilities imposed by working
in color. Though his trepidation was probably technical rather than aesthetic,
whatever the precise reasons Leiter’s position was clearly antithetical to Roland
Barthes’s view that color undermined photography’s (arguable) veracity, that
it was merely a ‘coating applied later on the truth of the black-and-white
photograph.’ Walker Evans was another figure who, despite his nostalgic attraction
to the archaeology of the signs of consumer culture, considered the random
disjunctions of the colors of the city ‘vulgar’; however, Evans’s judgement only
Sign Painter, 1954
serves to emphasize Leiter’s innate sensitivity and selectivity, the transformative
power of his imagery, which renders even the most Pop of his ‘found’ raw
material (which sometimes extended to the kind of low art subjects dismissed
by Clement Greenberg as kitsch) with anything but vulgarity.

It is important to bear in mind that in the late-1940s and early-!950s relatively

few photographs, other than those intended for reproduction in magazines or
as advertisements, were made in color. Leiter was faced with two additional
problems: not only was the cost of laboratory prints exorbitant, but the exact
chemistry of the color process placed limitations on creative control of the final
image which acted as a further disincentive. Yet he found ways to circumvent
these restrictions — exploiting the color distortions inherent in outdated film
stock and embracing the unpredictable color rendition in emulsions available
from some of the smaller manufacturers. His openness to the accidental,
and the willingness to forgo the photographer's legendary control. are crucial
components of Leiter's ethos, anticipating precepts that remained exceptional,
even among photography’s avant-garde, until the advent of postmodernism
in the 1970s.

Several factors conspired to delay recognition for Leiter’s vast body of non-
commercial photographs, among which, it must be admitted, was an enigmatically
subversive streak, combined with a measure of disdain for self-promotion;
together with a solid artistic integrity, these tendencies were liable to be
misinterpreted, and almost invariably were. Improbably, his late friend, the
art director Henry Wolf, called him ‘Snappy’, but in the context of this serious
reappraisal it would be misleading not to mention Leiter’s sense of humor, the
slow, gurgling laugh that accompanies a joke — frequently self-deprecating — or
the withering rejection of a pretentious remark. Although Edward Steichen
exhibited some of Leiter’s color photographs in a group show, Always the Young
Stranger, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for forty years afterwards they
remained virtually unknown to the wider art world. Several decades elapsed
before all but a tiny proportion of these early transparencies was realised in
print form. Significantly, their only other ‘public’ viewings in the 1950s had been
on the occasions when Leiter projected them in his East |Oth Street studio,
sometimes for the benefit of a few invited friends: thus, half-a-century ago his
guests had been privileged participants in what might later have been termed
a performance event or an installation.

Shopper (1953), Walking (1956), Cracks (1957), and indeed most of the images
in Early Color, render color and motion in semi-abstract free-form — fluid,
improvisational. Reflected figures dissolve into elegiac blur, shifting in focus,
intangible, lost in time. The evocative, painterly images on these pages vividly
demonstrate that in the second half of the twentieth-century Saul Leiter’s
photographic language of fragmentation and contingency was extending the
boundaries of the medium.

Martin Harrison, July 2005

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1956
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1954
Reading
1950
Street Scene, New York
1958
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1958
Walking
1956
Shopper
53
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1960
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1956
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1954
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1958
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1957
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1960
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1956
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1954
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1956
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Kutztown
1948
1950
White Circle, 1958
Window Dresser, 1956
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1956
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1954
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1954
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1954
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1948
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1959
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1950
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1959
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1958
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1960
Walk with Soames
1958
Horse
1958
Limousine
1958
Tanager Stairs
54
Hat
1958
 White
Brooklyn, 1949
Soames, England, |97|
ery
 First edition 2006
Second edition 2007
Third edition 201 |
Fourth edition 2013

Design: Martin Harrison

Design production:
Tony Waddingham
Scans by Steidl’s digital darkroom
Production and printing: Steidl, Géttingen
Copyright © 2013 Saul Leiter for the images
Copyright © 2013 Martin Harrison for the text
Copyright © 2013 Steid! Publishers for this edition

Steid|
Diistere Str 4 / 37073 Gottingen, Germany
Roney 4 ol55-47 CONGO) raat 4+o Sol-49 60N649
E-mail: mail@steidl.de
www.steidiville.com / www.steidl.de

ISBN 978-3-86521-139-2
Printed in Germany by Steidl
Public
Library

VAT) 0 01 00 7976954 2
 4“

Printed in Germany by Steid

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