Saul Leiter- A Portfolio

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Saul Leiter: A PortfolioINTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

324 ARTFORUM


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So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes

whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by asil ver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It’svery quick, bright, exciting. But superficial per-

haps. I should like to take the globe in my hands

and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so

hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I

will go backwards and forwards.

—Virginia Woolf, November 28, 1928

IN 2006, AFTER A TEN-YEAR SEARCH for a publisher,New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery persuaded

Steidl to issue Saul Leiter’s first book, Early Color.This monograph, which has just reappeared in a

fourth edition, contains roughly eighty photographs

taken as color slides predominantly in the 1940s and

’50s (with several dating from 1960). Retrieved byLeiter only decades later, and nearly all printed for the

first time, the pictures emerged as a revelatory pageant.

As if by a flash of lightning, the book established Leiter,

born in 1923, as a pioneer of color photography, as

astute, avid, and inventive as any of his better-known

colleagues, contemporaries, and successors.Leiter’s color photographs can seem at once reti-

cent and ecstatic, playful and contemplative. Spanning

the years, they qualify, for this viewer, as the work

of a consummate “termite artist”—Manny Farber’s

unglamorous term for a quietly obsessive lone artist

nibbling away at a particular corner of experience,

nourished by curiosity and an ever-renewable capac-ity for aesthetic discovery. Signature Leiter moves—

everywhere apparent in this portfolio of previouslyunpublished pictures—include shooting through

fog-blurred or rain-streaked windows, catching fig-ures in shadow or from behind, focusing on hands

and feet rather than faces, integrating frames withinframes, allowing reflections and bold blurred shapesto tangle and fill out the compositions.

Japanese prints and the paintings of Vuillard andBonnard have been invoked, with Leiter’s approval,

SUMMER 2013 325

Above: Saul Leiter, Merce and

John, ca. 1952, gelatin silver print,

9 x 6".

Opposite page: Saul Leiter, String ,

ca. 1955, gelatin silver print,

93 ⁄ 4 x 9 3 ⁄ 4".

Above: Saul Leiter, Duchamp,

ca. 1952, gelatin silver print,

10 x 8".

Left: Saul Leiter, Andy and

Mother , ca. 1950, gelatin

silver print, 7 x 5".


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326 ARTFORUM

The sense of dislocation in a Leiterimage, something like the photo-graphic equivalent of Cubist frag-mentation, accounts for the way hispictures seem to jump forward in

time, appearing more contemporarythan they happen to be.

as precursors for the photographer’s flattened spaces,

sharply angled perspectives, and muted, slashed, orflame-like color. And you don’t need a course on

Matisse or Manet to recognize the cleverness in usingbands and blocks of pure black to ignite a picture’s

palette—a standard Leiter strategy, singularly effec-

tive, and rare in early photographic color. Looking

closer to home, you might also see an affinitybetween Leiter’s photos and the brilliant breezy lay-outs of Al Parker, the ace American illustrator who

introduced radical cropping and a near-abstract flat-ness into paintings adorning major magazines in the

years leading up to Leiter’s hit-and-miss career as a

fashion photographer.There is, in any case, an inescapable element of

nostalgia adhering to the midcentury details caughton the fly in his early color work—in men’s hats and

overcoats, sylphlike female silhouettes, window dis-

plays smoldering among shards of reflected streetsignage. We’re not accustomed to seeing this world

in color. The tug of nostalgia can even seem to reachpast the point of the photographs’ origins. Todd

Haynes has gone out of his way to credit Leiter as the

primary visual inspiration for his 2011 HBO mini-series, Mildred Pierce [see, e.g., Amy Taubin’s inter-

view with Haynes, “Daughter Dearest,” Artforum,March 2011], though that story played out in the ’30s,

a decade before the photographer took up a camera.

That said, the sense of dislocation in a Leiter image,

something like that evoked by Cubist collage andfragmentation, also accounts for the way his pictures

can seem to jump forward in time, appearing more

contemporary than they happen to be. The imageson view here have been plucked from a cache of

recently retrieved color and black-and-white photos,

shot between the late ’40s and late ’60s but printedonly recently. In one modestly glorious image, from

around 1948, Philip Guston seems to have stepped infrom the subsequent decade to soap up a shopwindow

with a broad brush, creating a swirling AbEx cloud

that constitutes the photo’s thrilling main event.This summer, Steidl is publishing Saul Leiter:

Early Black and White, a two-volume follow-up tothe photographer’s first book. Among the surprises

in this extraordinary array of newly exhumed worksis a distinctive psychological ingredient: Many

images focus on faces and seem more intimate, more

interior, than those in the previous collection, grant-ing a more personal chronicle than Early Color

allowed. Sober and respectful portraits of Leiter’sfamily, from the ’40s, give way to more expressive

and antic character studies, including a range of self-portraits. The black-and-white pictures also revealthat Leiter—who thinks of himself as a painter noless than as a photographer—stood in close proximityto major artists of his generation, friends and acquain-

tances who aggressively made their mark whileLeiter was barely getting by. Leiter photographed

Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Andy Warhol

and his mother (around 1950, when Warhol was afledgling fashion illustrator, newly arrived in New

York), Lotte Lenya, and (only the title cues us to his

identity) a seemingly anonymous man hunched in a

café, his back to the camera, a hat crowning his head:Marcel Duchamp. There’s also a particularly strongimage of W. Eugene Smith, circa 1950, looking as

tightly wound as a convict contemplating a prisonbreak, and a picture of a careworn Diane Arbus,

circa 1970, roughly a year before her suicide.

Perhaps the most surprising of the early black-and-white pictures are a number of nudes that are also

portraits. In the best of them, the interaction betweenphotographer and subject implies an absolute inti-

macy. Paul Strand’s remarkable portraits of his wife

Rebecca, taken during the ’20s, share a similar charge of candor and complicity, but there aren’t that many

other precedents for these nudes, which also display

a refreshing teasing quality, receptiveness measuredby alternating currents of vulnerability and sass. In

1960, Leiter settled into something approximatingdomestic bliss with a painter and erstwhile fashion

model named Soames Bantry. (Until her death in

2002, they resided in separate apartments at the sameEast Village address where Leiter stil l lives.) Soames’slong, folded body occupies a shadow-streaked bed

in one of the most abstract of Leiter’s nudes, Soames,ca. 1969, which appears on this page.

Having weathered decades of neglect, Leiter can

be forgiven for appearing strenuously wary and self-deprecating in Tomas Leach’s 2012 documentary,InNo Great Hurry, throughout which this modern mas-

ter keeps insisting he’s not a fit subject for a film. Thefact remains that Leiter, nearing ninety, exemplifies

a life of heroic steadfastness, and his late-bloomingcareer happens to be really taking off. More books are

forthcoming; his first full-career retrospective, orga-

nized by Deichtorhallen Hamburg and recently onview at Kunst Haus Wien, travels to Fotografie

Forum Frankfurt in spring 2014, and a show includ-

ing newly printed color photographs is currently onview at Fifty One gallery in Antwerp (through July

13), soon to be joined by an exhibition of his paint-ings and photographs at HackleBury Fine Art,

London (June 6–July 27).So the days pass, and Saul Leiter’s alert eye and

belatedly emerging body of work continue to distillthe perceptual clatter, the daily parade of impres-

sions and feelings, the hypnotic bright quick thingsthat only a very gifted artist can catch and describe.

Just look.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA IS A NEW YORK–BASED WRITER

AND FILMMAKER. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

Saul Leiter, Soames, ca. 1969,

gelatin silver print, 7 x 5".


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Saul Leiter, Pipes, ca. 1960,

C-print, 14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, Circles, ca. 1949,

C-print, 14 x 11".


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Saul Leiter, Mannequin, ca. 1952,

C-print, 14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, Auto, ca. 1960, C-print,

14 x 11".


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Saul Leiter, Mr., ca. 1958, C-print,

14 x 11".


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Saul Leiter, Red Curtain, ca. 1956,

C-print, 14 x 11".


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Saul Leiter, Painted, ca. 1948,

C-print, 14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, L & L Dairy , ca. 1949,

C-print, 14 x 11".


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Saul Leiter, Menu, Paris, 1959,

C-print, 14 x 11".

Saul Leiter, Black and White,

ca. 1949, C-print, 14 x 11".


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SUMMER 2013 333

Saul Leiter, Ant , ca. 1950, C-print,

11 x 14".

Saul Leiter- A Portfolio

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