Untitled, New York, 1960
© All photographs copyright by Saul Leiter
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“Leiter captured the passing illusions of everyday life with a precision that might almost seem scientific, if it weren't so poetically resonant and visually layered. His images depict a complex interaction of people, architecture and weather that is full of fragmented, partial, veiled or multiplied forms and figures…. In the end his subject is the urban visual experience – not people on the street, but what they see.”
– Roberta Smith
In the 1960s-1970s, an iconoclastic band of young American photographers, chief among them Eggleston, Shore, Meyerowitz and Sternfeld, took to the street, and irrevocably established color as a vibrant alternative to black and white in the domain of expressive, socially-concerned photography. Only very recently has the seminal color street photography of Saul Leiter from an earlier decade, the 1950s, come to be appreciated.
Trained as a painter, Leiter was introduced to photography by the abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart. Leiter's picture-making approach, while rightly classified as part of the New York School defined by Robert Frank, William Klein and their circle, brings to the genre a distinctive painterly sensibility and color palette suggestive of Bonnard, Vuillard, or de Kooning.
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| “Selecting small, half-hidden, scenes on the street – or desultory moments glimpsed in his private environment – Leiter has forged a body of images whose distinctively subtle aura qualifies them as a landmark contribution to the still photography of the era,” Jane Livingston has written. “They are lyrical without being sentimental and psychologically penetrating without being theatrical.” This show presents a cross-section of forty of Leiter's finest color photographs from that period, including a small but choice selection of his inventive fashion work. For a fuller appreciation of the artist, these works are supplemented by ten of Leiter's mixed-media figurative paintings (acrylic on photographs). |
