Saul Leiter: Early Color

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I have enjoy some of Saul Leiter's work and this is the second time I have taken a stab at this book. I really enjoyed reading your concluding assessment of Leiter and his kind of loneliness that also allows for connections. Your reference to Levitt’s understanding of Jewishness as not exclusive works very well for Leiter, especially in the way he seems to invite viewers to participate with him in his exploration of the world of color as seen through the camera’s lens. I agree that the digital has changed a lot and viewing images through our phones in the palms of our hands makes for a different engagement with the world around us.

Saul Leiter | Howard Greenberg Gallery Saul Leiter | Howard Greenberg Gallery

Saul Leiter says, “everything is a photograph.” This quote rung true for me as I was out taking my own photographs. Everything I looked at on the streets of Winsor, Canada, I thought could become an abstract photograph either because of the shapes, lines, or color. For example, the close-up photos I took of the bridge remind me of Leiter’s abstract photos as the color blue lays against the bright blue sky and the lines all intertwine. It is almost hard to tell what it is at first glance, something I learned Leiter’s photographs do as well.

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Mr. Leiter made few prints of his art photographs: it was enough for him, he said, to show slides of them to small gatherings of friends, projecting the images onto his living room wall. He roamed the streets daily with his camera, and he continued to paint. In some works he merged the two mediums, adding layers of paint atop his already layered photographic images. exhibition Saul Leiter: Gouaches and Color Slides at Tanager Gallery. Around this time Leiter gives a slide talk about his color work at the Club, an East Village art space. Mr. Leiter (pronounced LIGHT-er), under some protest, came to renewed attention in recent years. In 2005 his early color photography was the subject of a well-received exhibition at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan; in 2006 an illustrated book, “Saul Leiter: Early Color,” with a foreword by the art historian Martin Harrison, helped make it even more widely known.

Saul Leiter | Artnet | Page 2 Saul Leiter | Artnet | Page 2

Photographer Saul Leiter: A Retrospective, Leiter’s first solo exhibition in Japan, opens at Tokyo’s Bunkamura Museum of Art, with accompanying book, All About Saul Leiter, published by Seigensha. The exhibition travels in Japan for the next two years. I chose Saul Leiter’s Early Color because I find his use of color and abstraction to create different dimensions of reality revolutionary. His choice of photographs to include portrays his own upbringing in the sense that he was isolated from his family while also creating a relaxing, picturesque scene that resemble his earlier paintings.

and-white photographs shown in Leiter’s first exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. Leiter receives funding from Ilford Paper Company to begin printing 35mm color slides as Ilfochromes with Laumont Editions in New York.

Early Color | Howard Greenberg Gallery Early Color | Howard Greenberg Gallery

Unplanned and unstaged, Mr. Leiter’s photographs are slices fleetingly glimpsed by a walker in the city. People are often in soft focus, shown only in part or absent altogether, though their presence is keenly implied. Sensitive to the city’s found geometry, he shot by design around the edges of things: vistas are often seen through rain, snow or misted windows. Exhibition Saul Leiter: Through the Blurry Window opens at Piknic in Seoul, South Korea. Forever Saul Leiter travels in Japan.

includes twenty of Leiter’s color photographs in his slide talk “Experimental Photography in Color” at MoMA. Henry Wolf, art director at Esquire, publishes Leiter’s fashion photographs. Transportation Authority displays eight Duratrans color images by Leiter at Sixth Avenue & Forty-Second Street subway station, New York. New York at midcentury was a monochrome town, or so its best-known documentarians would have us believe. circa)Photographs in Harlem for Esquire, with a selection of images published in July 1960 issue alongside James Baldwin’s essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown.” Rents studio space from fashion photographer John Rawlings. Begins relationship with model Soames Bantry, who moves into Leiter’s East Tenth Street apartment building.