New York at midcentury was a monochrome town, or so its best-known documentarians would have us believe.
But where eminent photographers like Weegee, Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon captured the city most often in clangorous, sharp-edged black and white, Saul Leiter saw it as a quiet polychrome symphony — the glow of neon, the halos of stoplights, the golden blur of taxis — a visual music that few of his contemporaries seemed inclined to hear.
One of the first professionals to photograph New York City regularly in color, Mr. Leiter, who died on Tuesday at 89, was among the foremost art photographers of his time, despite the fact that his work was practically unknown to the general public.Of the tens of thousands of images he shot — many now esteemed as among the finest examples of street photography in the world — most remain unprinted.
Trained first as a rabbi and then as a painter, Mr. Leiter the photographer spent the last 60 years being cyclically forgotten and rediscovered. In the end he remained very nearly the antithesis of a household name, a state of affairs that, with his lifelong craving for privacy and genial constitutional dyspepsia, he found hugely satisfying.
“In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined,” Mr. Leiter said in an interview for a monograph published in Germany in 2008. “One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.” (...)
Mr. Leiter was considered a member of the New York School of photographers — the circle that included Weegee and Arbus and Avedon — and yet he was not quite of it. He was largely self-taught, and his work resembles no one else’s: tender, contemplative, quasi-abstract and intensely concerned with color and geometry, it seems as much as anything to be about the essential condition of perceiving the world.
“Seeing is a neglected enterprise,” Mr. Leiter often said. (...)
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.
“A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person,” Mr. Leiter says in “In No Great Hurry.”
by Margalit Fox, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Saul Leiter via:
