Saul Leiter (b. 1923 in Pittsburgh) has finally taken his rightful place among the great pioneers of color photography. After coming to New York in 1946, he exhibited alongside abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning before beginning in the late 1940s to take photographs. Like Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction.
Edward Steichen (renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography, he served as Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art from 1947-1961) was one of the first to discover Leiter's photography, showing it in the 1950s in two important exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Back then color photography was regarded as "low art," fit only for advertising. Leiter accordingly worked primarily as a fashion photographer, for magazines such as Esquire and Harper's Bazaar.
Nearly forty years would go by before his extraordinary artistic color photography was rediscovered. Perhaps this happened only posthumously, because for a long time the artist saw himself primarily as a painter. This volume is truly comprehensive in its coverage of his career with early black and white and color images, his fashion photography, the overpainted nudes, as well as his paintings and sketchbooks.
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