In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper's Bazaar.Įdward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Leiter worked as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. He began associating with other contemporary photographers such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus and helped form what Jane Livingston has termed the New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1948, he started taking color photographs. Eugene Smith encouraged Leiter to pursue photography and he was soon taking black and white pictures with a 35 mm Leica, which he acquired for a few Eugene Smith prints. He had developed an early interest in painting and was fortunate to meet the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist. His mother gave him his first camera at age 12. His father was a well-known Talmud scholar and Saul studied to become a rabbi. Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Several planes come together to obscure what would otherwise seem to be the main subject of the photograph.Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography. Largely shot using telephoto lenses, mirrors and windows tend to be the recurring motifs in these photographs bordering on abstraction.

There is no decisive moment, just a series of moments and a collection of undecided possibilities. Unlike contemporaries like Winogrand and Klein, his street photos tease, but don’t tell. But Saul chose colour to imagine a reverie. Colour was, at that time, looked at with horror, antithetical to a serious artistic practice, only adorning the editorial and commercial spaces of photographers such as Blumenfeld. It was a chance encounter with expired Kodachrome that led to the hue that is now recognised as his characteristic palette…intensely warm colours with oddly faded tones. It’s exciting to see the various visual leitmotifs that he keeps finding in his street work, and then analyse how often he deliberately uses them on commissioned shoots.

Photographer saul leiter