Saul Leiter - Artistic Contribution

Artistic Contribution

Leiter’s earliest black and white photographs show an extraordinary affinity for the medium, and by 1948 he began to experiment in color. Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.

Leiter has made an enormous and unique contribution to photography. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. Perhaps this is because Leiter has continued through the years to work as both a photographer and painter. His painterly sensibility reaches fruition in his painted photographs of nudes on which he has actually applied layers of gouache and watercolor.

Martin Harrison, editor and author of Saul Leiter Early Color, writes, "Leiter’s sensibility . . . placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances."

Saul Leiter’s work is featured prominently in Jane Livingston’s book The New York School and in Martin Harrison’s Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945. His work is in the collections of many prestigious public and private collections. In 2008, The Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris mounted Leiter’s first museum exhibition in Europe with an accompanying catalog. Leiter is represented in New York by the Howard Greenberg Gallery

Leiter is the subject of a 2013 documentary 'In No Great Hurry - 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter'. Saul Leiter is a featured subject in the documentary film 'Tracing Outlines' by 2nd State Productions.