Among the items Erb and Goldfarb have unearthed is a catalogue from a 1947 exhibition of American Surrealism at the Art Institute of Chicago that included a painting by Leiter, who was then twenty-four.
Leiter, who was born in 1923, started taking pictures in adolescence, but despite showing early promise as a photographer and painter he mostly remained obscure. Primitive trinkets and vintage toys, including a Mickey Mouse doll, sit on the mantle canvases of folk and Japanese art lean against the walls. Figurative paintings by Soames Bantry, Leiter’s partner, hang alongside his own abstract watercolors. Old saucers that he used as palettes are stacked on the window ledge above a quiet courtyard. A high-backed wooden chair, where he painted and drank coffee, sits in a corner of a large room lit by a wall of windows. "I don't have a philosophy, I have a camera." Saul LeiterĪn iconoclast who pursued his vision through signature framing devices, bold hues and relective surfaces, Leiter manages to transform seemingly ordinary street scenes in close proximity to his New York apartment into visual poetry.The apartment today is far more organized than it was when Leiter died, but evidence of his life is everywhere. Instinctively for him, colour was the picture.
He moved to New York intent on becoming a painter, which he continued in parallel with his photography, yet ended up working for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Elle and British Vogue and became known for his fashion work.Īs early as 1946, and thus two decades before the 1970s new colour photography school (William Eggleston, Stephen Shore et al), Leiter was using Kodachrome colour slide film for his free artistic shots, despite it being despised by artists of the day. It seems remarkable that Saul Leiter (1923-2013) is only just beginning to acquire significant mainstream recognition for his pioneering role in the emergence of colour photography. Once lost to obscurity, this photographer is now a legendWashington Post
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