A new collection of Saul Leiter's work, much of it published here for the first time.
Saul Leiter remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s, and his work has been drastically re-evaluated over the last two decades. Leiter’s painterly images evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour, at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. His complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.
In recent years, Leiter has been in the spotlight more and more with a series of exhibitions and publications. His studio in New York's East Village, where he had lived since 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation. The foundation has begun a full-scale survey and organization of his more than 80,000 works, with the aim of compiling the ‘complete’ archive. This volume contains works discovered through this process, valuable documents that reveal the secrets of Saul Leiter's creation, unpublished works, popular colour works and black-and-white works that have not been published so far, as well as works that trace the memories of those closest to him taken in private.
As Saul Leiter said, ‘Photographs are often treated as capturing important moments, but they are really small fragments and memories of the world that never ends.’ This is Forever Saul Leiter.
About the author
Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh. He pioneered a painterly approach to colour photography in the 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s. The publication in 2006 of his first collection, Early Color, inspired an avid ‘rediscovery’ that has since led to worldwide exhibitions and the release of a documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2013). He died in New York in 2013.
Margit Erb is the founder and director of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving Leiter’s art and legacy.
Pauline Vermare is Cultural Director at Magnum Photos.
Motoyuki Shibata is a scholar and translator of American literature.
