Saul Leiter

Family and Painting

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923 into the family of a prominent Talmudic scholar and rabbi. Expected to follow the same path, he studied at a theological seminary, but his interest in painting intensified during his teens, and in 1946 he left his studies and moved to New York.^*1 In New York he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who encouraged him to experiment with photography. Leiter also became acquainted with W. Eugene Smith, and after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1947 exhibition at MoMA he began photographing more seriously in the streets.^*2

He did not abandon painting after taking up photography. In an Aperture visit late in his life, Leiter spoke of his continuing attachment to painting; his home and studio still contained paintings by both Leiter and his longtime partner, Soames Bantry.^*25 University museum exhibition materials place the flattened color sensibility of Bonnard and Vuillard, as well as the stimulus of Pousette-Dart, among the backgrounds to Leiter’s early photographs.^*24 For Leiter, photography was not a substitute adopted after giving up painting. It developed alongside painting as another way to organize how the city could be seen.

Postwar New York

When Leiter arrived in New York in the late 1940s, opportunities for photography were expanding rapidly across magazines, advertising, museums, and galleries. In The New York School: Photographs, 1936–1963, Jane Livingston grouped Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Leiter, and others as a loose constellation of photographers who shared the contingencies of city life and magazine culture rather than membership in a formal movement.^*36 The “New York School,” then, should be understood as a later art-historical framework for comparing distinct practices, not as a style or organization declared by the photographers themselves.

Max Kozloff’s exhibition New York: Capital of Photography placed New York street photography within a longer urban history extending through Lewis Hine, the Photo League, Helen Levitt, Roy DeCarava, Lisette Model, William Klein, Garry Winogrand, and others.^*38 Within this lineage, street photography was never a single method. Direct social documentation, the movement of crowds, personal isolation, and the pressures of metropolitan space all coexisted in photographs made in the same city. Leiter’s distinctive position lies in his attention to urban experience in which people are only partly visible through windows, reflections, snow, car bodies, and signage, instead of being clarified through a decisive event.

Leiter participated in MoMA’s 1953 exhibition Always the Young Strangers, so he was not an unknown photographer suddenly discovered in the 2000s.^*32 The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson likewise notes his participation in that exhibition and his connection to postwar New York photography.^*34 There was, however, a substantial gap between the black-and-white photographs and commercial work known within institutions in the 1950s and the vast body of personal color work that later came to define his reputation.

The Exhibition Context for Color

Color photography was not entirely excluded from museums in the 1950s. MoMA organized Color Photography in 1950.^*33 Color printing was nevertheless expensive, and 35mm color remained closely associated with magazines, advertising, and domestic slide projection. The Milwaukee Art Museum notes that much of Leiter’s early color work survived as slides and that substantial exhibition prints were not produced until the 1990s.^*27

Leiter had used color slides since the late 1940s. He projected them at Tanager Gallery in 1955, and in 1957 Edward Steichen presented twenty of them in a MoMA lecture.^*2 It is therefore inaccurate to say that he never showed his color work. The more useful question is how often, and in what forms—slide projections, magazines, later Ilfochrome prints, or photobooks—those photographs remained visible over time.

The black-and-white photographs from the 1940s and 1950s gathered in Early Black and White, together with essays by Max Kozloff and Jane Livingston, show that cropped frames, strong divisions of light and shadow, and foreground elements obscuring figures were already present before Leiter’s mature color work.^*37 His later color photographs were therefore not a separate style created simply by adding color. Their red, yellow, and green fields became new structural elements within an urban fragmentation that had already developed in his black-and-white work.

Color and the City

By the late 1940s, Leiter was already using color slide films such as Kodachrome^*3. Color at the time was closely tied to magazines, advertising, and domestic slides, while black-and-white still dominated fine-art photography. Leiter used a red umbrella, a yellow or green vehicle, or a reflection in glass as a compositional element rather than merely as descriptive information. In 1954 he showed color work in a group exhibition selected by Clement Greenberg; in 1955 he projected color slides at Tanager Gallery; and in 1957 Steichen included twenty works in his MoMA lecture Experimental Photography in Color^*2. The later rediscovery associated with Early Color should therefore not be confused with complete obscurity during Leiter’s lifetime. Opportunities were limited, but his color work was already being shown within photographic circles in the 1950s.

Color photography itself was not absent from museums in the 1950s. MoMA’s 1950 exhibition Color Photography included work by eighty-nine photographers.^*33 At the same time, the Milwaukee Art Museum notes that color prints were costly and difficult to produce, and that much of Leiter’s color work remained in slide form for decades.^*27 Taken together, these facts make the familiar story of Leiter as the lone color photographer in an era that rejected color too simple. His importance lies in continuing to construct pictures out of red umbrellas, vehicles, signs, and reflections at a time when the exhibition, preservation, and sale of color photographs were still unstable, using color as part of the image’s structure rather than as supplementary information about the street.

Obstruction and Color Fields

Large foregrounds, fogged windows, figures cut by signs, and broad areas of darkness or emptiness distinguish Leiter’s photographs from compositions designed to communicate a street event clearly. Leiter himself spoke of liking to photograph “through things” and of being drawn to images that dissolve behind fog or glass^*1. His interest in Bonnard, Vuillard, Degas, and other painters is documented by the foundation and exhibition sources, while Bunkamura has emphasized the color sensibility that moves across his painting and photography^*11. The relationship is more specific than a simple attempt to make photographs look like paintings. Windows, car bodies, advertising, snow, and reflections already existed in the street, and Leiter used them to build scenes that could not be read all at once. Because windows and reflections obscure figures, the viewer must infer the place or event from partial information.

Telephoto Compression

In works such as Taxi, Through Boards, and Snow, telephoto-like compression and foreground obstructions bring distant figures and nearby fields of color onto the same shallow plane^*3. Leiter preferred returning to a few blocks around his home to searching for major events, accumulating changes in weather and light on familiar streets^*21. This method loosens street photography from the pursuit of a decisive moment. By withholding a face and leaving only a back, umbrella, or pair of feet, Leiter avoids fixing who a passerby is or exactly what has happened; the figure remains one element among the city’s weather and color.

Between Painting and Photography

Leiter did not explain his use of color fields and reflections solely through the influence of other photographers. Materials from QAGOMA and the Zillman Art Museum note the persistence of a painter’s sense of color in his photographs and his tendency to treat street fragments as flattened fields.^*23 The photographs do not add a painterly effect after the fact. They combine colors and obstructions already present in glass, snow, vehicles, clothing, and signs. Moving back and forth between painting and photography helped Leiter treat color as an organizing structure for the entire frame instead of simply an attribute of the subject.

Slides and Later Prints

Many of the color photographs now circulated as Leiter’s major works were originally projected as slides rather than produced as large finished prints. In 1993, with support from Ilford, he began making Ilfochrome prints from 35mm slides in earnest at Laumont Editions in New York^*2. According to Bunkamura’s research, only a little over two hundred color works are known to have been seen by Leiter as prints during his lifetime; for many years, viewing his color photographs as projected light remained central^*11. Early Color, published by Steidl in 2006, was the first monograph edited from this large body of slides. Together with a Howard Greenberg Gallery exhibition and a solo exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum that year, it accelerated the international reassessment of his work^*9.

Fashion and Personal Work

From 1958 onward, Leiter’s work for Harper’s Bazaar carefully coordinated models, clothing, color, and urban space to meet the demands of a commercial magazine^*10. In his personal work, the same city appears at a more ambiguous distance: subjects are not arranged as in fashion photography, and obstacles that interrupt the view remain in the frame. Howard Greenberg Gallery’s retrospective materials show that Leiter sustained commercial assignments and personal work in parallel for many years^*6. In My Room, with its nudes and intimate interior portraits, brings the camera closer than the street photographs do, yet mirrors, furniture, and partial bodies continue the same interest in obstruction^*8.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales describes Leiter’s 1959 Harper’s Bazaar work as restrained and delicate in contrast with the dynamic clarity of Richard Avedon, whose work strongly shaped the magazine’s visual identity at the time.^*35 In the museum’s example, screens, mirrors, and windows surround the model, bringing the same habit of looking through an intervening surface into a commissioned photograph intended to display clothing. Commercial photography allowed some control over models, garments, and lighting, while the street required an acceptance of accidents involving snow, windows, pedestrians, and cars. Yet in both settings Leiter often treated the figure and the surrounding fields of color as equivalent compositional elements instead of placing the person clearly at the center. A strict division between fashion and personal work therefore obscures part of his method.

Through BoardsTaxiSnow

The foundation’s color pages reproduce Taxi (1957), Through Boards (1957), Snow, and other works^*3. The National Gallery of Art also holds Through Boards and snowy street scenes, placing Leiter’s use of color and obstruction within a museum collection^*15. In these photographs, the central subject is as much what glass, traffic, snow, and signage reveal or conceal as the people or buildings themselves.

Early Color

Early Color was published by Steidl in 2006 and circulated Leiter’s color photography widely for the first time in book form.^*9 LensCulture has traced how the publication and European retrospectives returned color slides that had long remained boxed away to discussions of photography history.^*26 The early date of exposure and the late date of publication need to be kept separate. Many images photographed in the 1950s became familiar through prints produced decades later; today’s “major works” were shaped through the movement from slide to later print to photobook edit.

Exhibition History in the 1950s

After the publication of Early Color in 2006, Leiter quickly became widely known as a pioneer of color photography^*14. Exhibitions at Gallery Fifty One and M+B contributed to this reassessment^*16. Yet Ernst Haas and others were also working actively in color at the time, and the history of artistic color photography cannot be reduced to a single inventor. Leiter’s specificity lies less in the date at which he adopted color than in the way he linked color to psychological and spatial obstruction within the city, deliberately reducing the amount of information a photograph yields.

Jane Livingston’s placement of Leiter within the “New York School” in 1992 was one important point in his later reassessment.^*36 The term did not name a movement with a shared manifesto or organization. It became a framework for comparing photographers who moved between magazine work and personal street photography in postwar New York. As Kozloff’s history of New York photography shows, the same streets could support social critique, crowds, solitude, humor, and many other concerns.^*38 Within that larger urban history, Leiter’s importance lies in refusing to discard what is hidden or obstructed as photographic failure. Color and foreground barriers make the fragmentary act of experiencing the city itself a subject of the photograph.

Reassessment Since the 2000s

Printing and exhibitions at Howard Greenberg Gallery expanded during the 1990s, and the convergence of photobooks and museum shows in the 2000s helped produce the story of a long-overlooked genius^*12. Deichtorhallen’s retrospective brought photography, fashion, and painting together, broadening the terms of his reception^*10. Major exhibitions at Seigensha-related venues and Bunkamura also expanded Leiter’s audience in Japan^*18. The foundation’s archival work has continued to reassess an oeuvre that includes unorganized slides, paintings, and commercial assignments^*20.

Color Street Photography

Snow dissolves outlines; fogged windows and signs conceal bodies, preventing the viewer from grasping the city all at once. Leiter used this partial visibility as a compositional resource. Bunkamura’s 2017 and 2023 exhibitions brought photography, fashion, and painting together and emphasized the recurring roles of color and obstruction across these fields^*19. The foundation’s exhibition history shows continued museum reassessment after 2006, with attention broadening beyond “early color” to the relation between photography and painting, personal work and commercial media^*5.

The distinction between color photography made in Leiter’s own period and later New Color helps clarify his place. The Zillman Art Museum notes that Cartier-Bresson’s 1947 exhibition affected a generation associated with the New York School—including William Klein, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt as well as Leiter—and identifies Leiter’s combination of color and layered composition from the 1950s as a defining feature^*24. The National Gallery of Australia’s Colour + Concept placed Leiter in a history of early color experimentation that also included Ernst Haas, showing how color could function in abstract and conceptual ways beyond straightforward description^*30. FOMU likewise positions Leiter’s 1950s color work before the broader recognition of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston in the 1970s^*31. His importance, then, is not that he was “the first” to use color, but that he joined color, reflection, obstruction, and flattened composition to the immediacy of street photography at an unusually early stage.

Photobooks and the Archive

Because Leiter’s color photographs were often made decades before they were printed or published, his place in photography history requires a distinction between when an image was exposed and when it became visible to an audience. The foundation’s book list shows how Early Color was followed by Early Black and White, In My Room, and other differently edited bodies of work, changing which parts of the archive entered public view^*4. Howard Greenberg Gallery’s Early Color exhibition formed a central part of the reassessment that accompanied the book’s publication and played an important role in selecting which images circulated as prints^*7. Bunkamura’s 2017 exhibition decisively expanded Leiter’s recognition in Japan and presented black-and-white work, painting, and fashion alongside color as parts of a single oeuvre^*13. M+B exhibitions broadened his reception on the U.S. West Coast^*17. The 2023 centennial exhibition foregrounded the cataloging of previously unorganized slides and newly identified works, shifting attention from the repetition of an established canon toward the archive itself^*22. This publication history makes clear that the work reached its present form through slides, commercial magazines, later prints, photobooks, and exhibitions.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston registers Through Boards as a 1957 exposure printed later and notes that Leiter repeatedly photographed the streets around his East Village home.^*28 The Museum of Contemporary Photography holds Snow and other works within the history of color photography.^*29 Such collection records provide evidence for understanding Leiter through the relation among location, later printing, painting, and commercial photography.