First published by T Magazine on 21 January 2016
“You could almost say he had a lifetime of being continually rediscovered,” says Margit Erb, formerly of the Howard Greenberg Gallery, referring to her friend, the photographer Saul Leiter. Leiter — who died in 2013, just shy of his 90th birthday — had a varied seven-decade career, and gained his most significant recognition in the last years of his life, with the 2006 publication of his book “Early Color.” “I think his rise back to fame was because people just couldn’t help stumbling over and over him, and realizing that the world needed to know him,” Erb says.
Now, with “Saul Leiter: Retrospective,” a new show opening at the Photographers’ Gallery in London this Friday, Leiter’s work comes back into focus. The photographer was astonishingly prolific: though he moved to New York in 1946 to become a painter, he found success as a prominent fashion photographer, one of a trio — alongside Richard Avedon and Hiro — who dominated the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1960s. For a period, he was well known, but his interest in magazine work eventually waned. “I think he just didn’t have a taste for it any more — to be pushed around,” says Erb. His studio closed in 1981, due to a failure to pay his taxes, and there followed a “very quiet time through the ’80s and early ’90s.”
Then his luck changed again. Since he first arrived in New York, Leiter had been documenting street life in black and white, intriguing the eye with his use of obstructions, blurred movement and half-concealed details. In 1992, his work came to the attention of the curator Jane Livingston, who included him in her “New York School”: a group of noteworthy midcentury photographers, including Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, with a film noirish vision of the city.
Leiter was also a pioneer of color photography: He developed a distinctive, dreamy style that played with shallow depths of field and a vibrant palette. Erb argues that these images are closely related to his love of painting. “You can see influences of abstract expressionism in his color work,” she says. This painterly aesthetic didn’t find acclaim until much later in his life, when “Early Color” was finally published. He has become a powerful cinematographic inspiration, too; the filmmakers Todd Haynes and Sam Mendes have both cited his influence on their work.
The London show features more than 100 works, but it doesn’t begin to touch on the enormous archive he left behind. The Saul Leiter Foundation, which was established in 2015 under the direction of Erb, reports a catalog of more than 3,000 paintings, several thousand photographs and multiple boxes of undeveloped negatives. If Leiter doesn’t have the household name that this work warrants, Erb says it may be due to his own reticence. “Saul didn’t care to promote himself — didn’t care to connect with the right curator or the right author or book publisher,” she says. “He relied on people finding him and stumbling over him, and bringing light to him.”
“Saul Leiter: Retrospective” is on view Jan. 22 – April 3 at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London, thephotographersgallery.org.uk.