Saul Leiter: Early Colour

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With an introduction by Martin Harrison

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Saul Leiter: Early Color

1948-1960

Saul Leiter’s vision is founded on a rapid eye for absorbing spontaneous events. Confronted by a dense web of data, fleeting moments in space and time, he employs an array of strategies — oblique framings, complex intersecting planes

and ambiguous reflections — to distil an urban visual poetry that is by turns deeply affectionate, edgy and breathtakingly poignant. He takes risks — flouting conventions of camera technique and apparently indifferent to the limits of the

light-gathering capacity of emulsions. The photographer of ‘found’ or ‘street’ imagery, as opposed to contrived tableaux, is required to deal with many givens. Yet Leiter’s enframings in Early

Color consistently re-present incidents which may be characterized by their calm introspection as much as by their tension, psychological or otherwise.

He seems to achieve this by a mysterious process of beguilement. Rather than imposing himself on situations he seeps, unobtrusively, into life’s unfolding

dramas; still, today, to observe him at work in Downtown New York remains an education in how photographers can avoid drawing attention to themselves. The origins of the semi-mythological

phenomenon

the ‘New York street

photographer’ may be traced back to coincide closely with Leiter’s arrival in New York in 1946. This moment in New York's cultural history may appear, with hindsight, as a brief, if buoyant, hiatus, before its spirit was partly blunted

by conservative politicians. But Leiter’s sensibility set his photographs apart from

some of the defining characteristics of the putative ‘New York School’ — as typified

by the visceral encounters with the pulse and anxieties of street life familiar from the 1950s imagery of photographers such as Robert Frank and William Klein. Leiter, by contrast, operated in a more reflective, less overtly confrontational mode, seeking out tranquility in the Manhattan

maelstrom.

He transformed

ostensibly banal or unpropitious subject matter into a unique urban pastoral. There were partial exceptions, such as D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable Daybreak

Express, a valediction to the Third Avenue elevated railroad (the El), and the street photographs of Helen Levitt, but none of his contemporaries assembled a comparably extensive body of work in color. And although Leiter was adept in black and white — indeed in certain formal and technical respects he was

arguably more radical in monochrome — the lyricism of his photographs is most acutely manifested in the eloquent interplay of colors. Among the seminal events that acted as catalysts for New York’s young photographers in the 1940s were the publication of André Kertész’s Day of Paris

(1945) and the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1947). Like the friendship he struck up with W. Eugene Smith, they also served to strengthen Leiter’s resolve, nudging his already strong inclinations toward unconventional ways of seeing. Yet ultimately his interpretations of reality are redolent of the European intimism of the painters Bonnard and Vuillard, artists

he greatly admires, as much as the work of any photographer; he shares, too, the French artists’ inspiration from the asymmetry and radical cropping of Japanese art.

Picture

Frame, Rome,

1959

A specific art-historical analogue that might be proposed here is Vuillard’s pastel

study Le Métro: ‘Station Villiers’ (1917, Musée du Prieuré, Saint-Germain-en-Laye), which translates an essentially modern, industrial subject into romantically delicate washes of color.

Saul was born in Pittsburgh in 1923, son of the internationally renowned Talmudic scholar, Wolf Leiter. He was intended for the Rabbinate, but in the teeth of strong paternal opposition abandoned Cleveland Theological College in 1946 and moved to New York, intending to become a painter. The majority of his paintings explore a fundamentally abstract language of flat planes of color;

to the extent that they contain a representational element it is described in a spontaneous, delicately wandering line, suggestive of here a landscape, here perhaps a figure. Formally, his palette is as expressive as it is unusual, a dialogue

between vibrancy and restraint in a secondary range of hues, from muted violets and mauves to evanescent ochres or yellows. And it will become evident from Early Color that these descriptions are almost equally applicable to the ambiance

of his photographs, as exemplified, for instance, by the spare geometrical underpinning of Mondrian Worker (1954) or the restrained, pastel shades of Tanager

Steps (1952). Soon after Leiter's arrival in New York, his paintings began to be exhibited, mainly in the Lower East Side galleries such as the Tanager Gallery, where they could be seen alongside those of Philip Guston, Philip Pearlstein and Willem de Kooning;

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inexplicably, they were never commercially successful, despite attracting the

intermittent interest of influential critics. He was introduced to the abstract expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart,

who was experimenting

in the

darkroom with portrait photographs which, as Leiter succinctly described, involved manipulation of the negatives, ‘blown up large, bleached and printed

soft-focus, in the style of Julia Margaret Cameron.’ In one of the paradoxes typical of Leiter’s life, it was, therefore, his friendship with a painter (PousetteDart) that proved to be a significant trigger for his recognition of the creative

potential of photography. Although he has never ceased painting, Leiter’s camera

became — like an

extension of his arm and mind — an ever-present tool, the offbeat chronicler of metropolitan scenes, which occasionally he found in Europe, as well as in the

United States. If his initial essays into photography were exclusively in black and white, to some extent this was dictated by financial considerations. But he was also, as he recalls it, ‘afraid’ of the responsibilities imposed by working in color. Though his trepidation was probably technical rather than aesthetic, whatever the precise reasons Leiter’s position was clearly antithetical to Roland Barthes’s view that color undermined photography’s (arguable) veracity, that it was merely a ‘coating applied later on the truth of the black-and-white

photograph.’ Walker Evans was another figure who, despite his nostalgic attraction to the archaeology of the signs of consumer culture, considered the random

disjunctions of the colors of the city ‘vulgar’; however, Evans’s judgement only

Sign Painter,

1954

serves to emphasize Leiter’s innate sensitivity and selectivity, the transformative power of his imagery, which renders even the most Pop of his ‘found’ raw material (which sometimes extended to the kind of low art subjects dismissed

by Clement Greenberg as kitsch) with anything but vulgarity. It is important to bear in mind that in the late-1940s and early-!950s relatively few photographs, other than those intended for reproduction in magazines or

as advertisements, were made in color. Leiter was faced with two additional problems: not only was the cost of laboratory prints exorbitant, but the exact chemistry of the color process placed limitations on creative control of the final image which acted as a further disincentive. Yet he found ways to circumvent these restrictions — exploiting the color distortions inherent in outdated film stock and embracing the unpredictable color rendition in emulsions available from some of the smaller manufacturers.

His openness to the accidental,

and the willingness to forgo the photographer's legendary control. are crucial components of Leiter's ethos, anticipating precepts that remained exceptional,

even among photography’s avant-garde, until the advent of postmodernism in the 1970s. Several factors conspired to delay recognition for Leiter’s vast body of non-

commercial photographs, among which, it must be admitted, was an enigmatically subversive streak, combined

with a measure

of disdain for self-promotion;

together with a solid artistic integrity, these tendencies were liable to be

misinterpreted, and almost invariably were. Improbably, his late friend, the art director Henry Wolf, called him ‘Snappy’, but in the context of this serious reappraisal it would be misleading not to mention Leiter’s sense of humor, the

slow, gurgling laugh that accompanies a joke — frequently self-deprecating — or

the withering rejection of a pretentious remark. Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Leiter’s color photographs in a group show, Always the Young Stranger, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for forty years afterwards they

remained virtually unknown to the wider art world. Several decades elapsed before all but a tiny proportion of these early transparencies was realised in

print form. Significantly, their only other ‘public’ viewings in the 1950s had been on the occasions when Leiter projected them in his East |Oth Street studio,

sometimes for the benefit of a few invited friends: thus, half-a-century ago his guests had been privileged participants in what might later have been termed a performance event or an installation.

Shopper (1953), Walking (1956), Cracks (1957), and indeed most of the images in Early Color, render color and motion in semi-abstract free-form — fluid, improvisational. Reflected figures dissolve into elegiac blur, shifting in focus, intangible, lost in time. The evocative, painterly images on these pages vividly demonstrate that in the second half of the twentieth-century Saul Leiter’s

photographic language of fragmentation and contingency was extending the boundaries of the medium.

Martin Harrison, July 2005

Dog in Doorway

Paterson, 1952

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Shoeshine

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Satin

Street Scene

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Barbershop

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Haircut

1956

Bus, New York

1954

Reading

1950

Street Scene, New York

1958

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Reflection

1958

Walking

1956

Shopper

53

Snow

Scene

1960

Spain

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Man Reading

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Hat

1956

Near the Tanager

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1954

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On the El

1958

Phone

1957

Call

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Harlem

1960

Taxi

1956

Mondrian Worker

1954

Yellow Scarf

1956

1956

Giaeks

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Kutztown

1948

1950

White

Circle,

1958

Window

Dresser,

1956

Worker

1956

Chauffeur

[S55

Painting

[955

Woman Waiting

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Street Scene

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Fire Hydrant

Sy

Man

on Ladder

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Through Boards

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Seeds

1954

Tanager Steps

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Pizza Paterson,

1952

Don't Walk

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Parade

1954

Red Umbrella

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Festival

1954

Newspaper Kiosk

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Seamstress

952

Postmen

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Snow Window

(O59)

Red Umbrella

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Red Lights

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Snow

Scene

1958

Coachman,

1957

Kutztown,

1948

Shirt 1948

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Looking Down

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Window

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Street Scene

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Snow

1960

Rome

1959

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Sec

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Waiter

Parise So

Paris

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Times Square Mosaic

1950

Paris Lovers

1959

Sign Painter

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Lanesville

1958

Harlem

1960

Walk with Soames

1958

Horse

1958

Limousine

1958

Tanager Stairs

54

Hat

1958

White Brooklyn, 1949

Soames,

England,

|97|

ery

First edition 2006

Second edition 2007

Third edition 201 | Fourth edition 2013 Design: Martin Harrison

Design production: Tony Waddingham Scans by Steidl’s digital darkroom Production and printing: Steidl, Géttingen Copyright © 2013 Saul Leiter for the images Copyright © 2013 Martin Harrison for the text Copyright © 2013 Steid! Publishers for this edition

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Roney

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ISBN 978-3-86521-139-2 Printed in Germany by Steidl

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4“

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