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Saul Leiter
Early Color
Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953,
for 40 years afterwards they remained virtually unknown to the art world. Early Color provides the first opportunity to
see a comprehensive presentation of images by one of photography’s great originals.
Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter and through his friendship with the abstract expressionist
Richard Pousette-Dart he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint,
exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became – like an extension of his arm and
mind – an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis.
The semi-mythical notion of the “New York street photographer” was born at the same time, in the late 1940s. But
Leiter’s sensibility – comparable to the European intimism of Bonnard, a painter he greatly admires – 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 alternative 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.
None of Leiter’s contemporaries, with the single and partial exception of Helen Levitt, assembled a comparable body
of work in color. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color: to the
rapid recording of the spontaneous unfolding of life on the street, Leiter adds an unconventional sense of form and a
brilliantly improvisational, and frequently almost abstract, use of found colors and tones. Leiter’s visual language of
fragmentation, ambiguity and contingency is evoked in Early Color by 100 subtle, painterly images that stretched the
boundaries of photography in the second half of the twentieth century.
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923, the son of a rabbi. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Baltimore Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London;
and other public and private collections.
Co-published with Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.
Saul Leiter
Early Color
Introduction by Martin Harrison
Book design by Martin Harrison
176 pages with 100 color plates
7.8 x 7.8 in. / 20 x 20 cm
Clothbound hardcover with dust jacket
$ 65.00 / £ 35.00 / € 48.00
ISBN: 978-3-86521-139-2
PostScript Bild
(9783865211392)
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