Book Review Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective Photographs by Saul Leiter Reviewed by Brian Arnold "There are some striking similarities between Dedalus/Joyce and New York photographer Saul Leiter. Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, Leiter descended from a long line of rabbis, including his father, and it was understood that Saul would follow in their footsteps..."

Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective.

Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective

Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2023. 352 pp., 332 color illustrations.

Saul
         Lighter
         Leeter
         Leader
         Lieter
         Leiter

Saul Leiter’s Letterhead

Saul once said that he was a ‘rabbinical ghost,’ meaning, I think, that he had retained vestiges of Talmudic schooling, where inquiry and the interpretation of texts were taught and fostered. He had absorbed that way of interrogating the world but had transposed it to the visual realm: he saw the streets of New York, and its inhabitants, with the narrative insight of a Talmudic scholar. The streets were his texts. His art was to recognize visual moments that evoke our deeper longings and needs, shape them through the lens of his aesthetics, and reflect them back to us.

Adam Harrison Levy

James Joyce’s classic novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a character commonly understood as Joyce’s alter ego. The novel starts with Stephen as an infant born to a Catholic family in Dublin and ends with him as a young man, rejecting the church and looking for new views of the world to explain his decision to strike out on his own and pursue a life an artist. Much of the novel focuses on his teenage years, a time when he was a student at a Jesuit school and wrestling with his hormones and desires. Stephen’s teachers saw his great potential and thought of him as a possible protégé, another Jesuit scholar, but Stephen couldn’t accept the basic theological premise that his desires and sensual experiences were corrupt. After visits to a brothel in Dublin, Stephen ultimately rejected the church and set out to reconcile his desire with a deeply felt need to find meaning and aesthetic fulfillment from his own life.

There are some striking similarities between Dedalus/Joyce and New York photographer Saul Leiter. Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, Leiter descended from a long line of rabbis, including his father, and it was understood that Saul would follow in their footsteps. At 23, after years of training in Talmudic scholarship, he decided to abandon his education and his family’s expectations and moved to New York to pursue a life as an artist. He spent the next 60 years painting and photographing his immediate neighborhood on East 10th Street, and like Joyce, showed us the deep, beautiful, and complex poetry that defines our daily lives. There are a lot of great books published of Leiter’s photographs, but the new Thames & Hudson monograph, Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, provides a definitive look at his life and art.

I’ve long loved Leiter’s photographs — the Steidl books Early Black and White, Early Color, and In My Room are all favorites — but I learned a great deal about him from this new publication. Edited by the directors of the Saul Leiter Foundation, Margit Erb and Michael Parillo, Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective provides an extensive look at Leiter’s unique work and accomplishments. The book is divided into 5 chapters. The first chapter, “Beginnings,” is a simple biography, providing essential information about his early years and family life. The subsequent chapters breakdown the major bodies of work that compose Leiter’s oeuvre — the photographs he made on the streets of New York, his work in the fashion industry, his gouache and watercolor paintings, and his nudes — each of them accompanied by a short essay grounded in detailed biographical criticism.

Since there are so many publications of Leiter’s photographs, I want to focus here on the work that surprised me the most, his paintings. The 2015 publication by Slyph Editions, Painted Nudes, offers an excellent look Leiter’s hand-painted photographs, but before reading The Centennial Retrospective I was entirely unaware that he also developed an amazing body of abstract color paintings. Apparently, everyday he sat on the floor of his apartment, and created these small, simple and exquisite watercolor and gouache paintings (he frequently claimed Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard as important influences in his approach to color). Through the course of his life, Leiter filled sketchbooks with these color abstractions, and at times even went so far as to call these books his best work. His paintings are full of rich colors and light, and convey a lovely and delicate humility, as though created with a warming and affirmative melancholy. The simplicity of the paintings is deceptive, each of them representing a Zen-like complexity (apparently, Leiter kept hundreds of books about Japanese art and calligraphy around his apartment). In 1945, shortly before he left Pittsburgh for New York, the art world power couple Merce Cunningham and John Cage bought one of Leiter’s paintings, providing him with essential acknowledgement as he was abandoning his rabbinical studies for art. Founder and Executive Director of the Saul Leiter Foundation, Margarit Erb repeatedly emphasizes that Leiter spent more of his lifetime as a painter than photographer, and tells us that before he ever picked up a camera, he spent his days copying Vermeer paintings. The Centennial Retrospective portrays Leiter as an innovative, multidisciplinary artist who pioneered a modernist vision across disciplines, identifying him as a pivotal figure of midcentury Modernism like William Klein or Robert Frank.

The biographical narrative in The Centennial Retrospective increased my admiration of Leiter and is what separates this book from all the others. Leiter was an innovative artist that lacked the sort of ego or bravado found in so many of his contemporaries. In his essay in the book, contributor Adam Levy Harrison cites an interview with Leiter in which he said, perhaps somewhat jokingly, “I wasn’t ambitious or driven. I don’t admire success the way some people do. I was fortunate to have fulfilled my ambition to be unsuccessful.” Leiter found acclaim late in life, and despite decades of humble living (apparently, he survived many eviction notices), the quiet and obscure life he led prior wasn’t a distraction. Indeed, I am sure it was the quiet life that allowed for such a rich and unique vision to mature. In her contribution to the book Erb recounts a story of the time renowned abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline saw Leiter’s small paintings. Kline told him that if he painted them big, he could be “one of the boys.” Leiter continued painting small; clearly, he had no interest in what Kline offered, recognizing the humble integrity of his work was exactly what made it important, foregoing the gallery attention Kline felt validated his work.

I do believe that Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective provides an important and definitive look at Leiter, primarily for the biographical information and reproductions of lesser-known work. If you are familiar with his photographs, you won’t find too many surprises here. Indeed, there are books that provide much higher quality reproductions of pictures (it’s hard to compete with Steidl). The design of the book is a little clumsy, using too many font sizes and strategies for page layouts. It feels as though the publisher never fully committed to a single strategy for best representing the work. Nevertheless, for those interested in learning more about the life behind the pictures, this book provides the clearest view yet.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Book Review The Unseen Saul Leiter Photographs by Saul Leiter Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Saul Leiter felt ambivalent about fame during his lifetime, seemingly content to wile away his years in blissful obscurity. But his posthumous legacy has been a much different story..."

The Unseen Saul Leiter By Saul Leiter.

The Unseen Saul Leiter
Photographs by Saul Leiter

D.A.P., 2022. 160 pp., 75 color illustrations, 8½x11".

Saul Leiter felt ambivalent about fame during his lifetime, seemingly content to wile away his years in blissful obscurity. But his posthumous legacy has been a much different story. The flame of recognition, first kindled in 2006 with his breakout hit Early Color, has become a bonfire in the 16 years since, raging past his 2013 death to establish him in the photo firmament. Various curations have poured forth since. He was the subject of a 2013 documentary biofilm. photo-eye’s site currently lists 17 monographs of his work and a few more about his apartment. All have been gas on the fire for fans and collectors, provoking not just impressions but questions. But who was this singular artist? What makes his pictures so appealing? And have we yet reached a point of Leiter saturation?

Before you answer that last question, you might want to take a look at The Unseen Saul Leiter. His most recent monograph — but almost certainly not the last — collects 76 slide photos from Leiter’s peak shooting years in New York City, 1948-1966. It’s curated by two people who know his work quite well, the wife/husband team of Margit Erb and Michael Parillo. Erb befriended Leiter just out of college in 1996 through her work at Howard Greenberg Gallery. In subsequent years she helped Leiter organize, store, edit and promote his archive before eventually creating The Saul Leiter Foundation to perform those tasks in perpetuity. She is the current foundation director. Parillo is her assistant.

This couple is as familiar with Leiter’s photos as anyone, and they enjoy ready access to them through the Foundation. That said, the back catalog is huge and unwieldy. Even for Erb and Parillo, it houses secrets among the ~60,000 slides in various boxes. Leiter’s life was intertwined with these containers. They lined his living quarters as he scraped together freelance jobs between artistic endeavors. It was hard enough to keep his pictures safely stored out of harm’s way. Organizing them into a book or show took another level of chutzpah, which he did not achieve until his last years. Even then, it was a small dent in the curatorial puzzle.

Leiter’s unfinished business forms the premise of this book. With the help of Elena Skarke, a German student using his archive as PhD material, Erb and Parillo commenced serious crate digging. Previous books had attempted something similar, but this time the focus was on Leiter’s early slides. He shot them mid-century on various film stocks, Ascochrome, Kodachrome or Ektachrome. They were then mounted in metal, plastic or paper carriers, and stuffed into storage with loosely categorized labels. One box was called “Boats New York”. Another was the “Personal Park Series”. There were boxes for “Workers” and “Street” and one suggestively labeled “Mix”, and so on.

These boxes collected in Leiter’s latter years in a smallish apartment/studio in the East Village stuffed to the gills with art, now the home of the SLF. The book brings his physical environment to the reader immediately, with an opening image of a slide projecting pictures against the apartment wall. We then see boxes and rows of old photographs, followed by a view through the window to its interior, and a contents page laid over an architectural diagram of his studio. The message is clear: this is a book rooted in place, and his home is an entry point to his head space. He spent many hours in these environs, and the opening sequence captures something of what it felt like to be there. Viewed now in the pandemic-era of home confinement, they take on added urgency.

Looking through his tiny digs stuffed with pictures, it must have been quite a chore for Leiter to cart them around Manhattan. He shuffled between living quarters from time to time. He may have discarded other items in the course of these moves, but never his life’s work. They have a very personal character, and Erb asked herself about the propriety of posthumous curation. “I wondered if I was crossing a line…was I meddling?” She and Parillo were on their own. The Unseen Saul Leiter is one of few monographs with no input from Leiter. Its curation might diverge from earlier books but if so, the soul of Leiter remains. Design and edit are subsumed by the power of his pictures.

These take place outside the apartment, of course, on the streets of Manhattan, and they are wonderful. Many photographers have prowled the same grounds, especially during Leiter’s post-war heyday. But his style is distinctive. In fact, Leiter is one of just a handful in history whose New York street work is immediately recognizable in just one or two frames. This might be attributable in part to the tools du jour. Shooting slide film in low light meant open apertures and long exposures, and the singular cast of old chromes colors all of Leiter’s work. But his work possesses a je ne sais quoi that transcends materials.

Reproduced in this handsome book on solid black backgrounds, familiar hallmarks appear in force. Leiter’s shallow depth of field, moody lighting, neon signs and habitual framing through glass or obstacles, his keen nose for serendipity. For a street shooter, he was atypically nonconfrontational. He rarely addressed any subject from a direct frontal vantage. It was always askance, into, adjacent or behind. The cover shot is a prime example, a moving figure shot from distance in dim light, the street lit up by a car’s rear blinker. This picture also captures Leiter’s unusual tendency for verticals, exaggerated to nice effect in the vertical format book. Other pictures range around the city, spanning about twenty years through Manhattan, Harlem, Central Park and the Village. Pedestrians, sedans and street signs pass through various weather. All are reshuffled in the book, seemingly at random, into three new “boxes”. If their curatorial logic isn’t exactly clear, at least they provide nice chapter breaks for essays by Erb and Parillo, in which they discuss the logistical challenges of editing old pictures, Leiter as a color pioneer and production details.

If you’ve browsed or bought previous Leiter monographs, you may be wondering what is new here, and if it’s enough to justify another book. Photographically speaking, this book is more affirmation than expansion. Beyond the fact these are slides, its pictures fit the pre-existing oeuvre seamlessly. There’s nothing here that wouldn’t slot unnoticed into Early Color or Forever Saul Leiter, and Leiter stalwarts will find few new insights. But all of that may well be immaterial. The Unseen Saul Leiter reconfirms — for the umpteenth time? — Leiter’s quiet mastery, and with a photographer of this caliber, that may well be enough. There are 76 new pictures, all well-sifted and considered, with nary a dud in the bunch, and at least a dozen outright bangers. All are previously unseen until now. Their publication is a gift to anyone generally who enjoys strong street work. For Leiter die-hards and completists, it will be required reading.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.