Saul Leiter – He broke with his family for art
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 3 December 1923. His father, a Talmud scholar, wished a career as rabbi for his son, but attending religion school could not offer Saul Leiter the same fulfilment as art, which fascinated him more and more and often drove him to the public library where he immersed himself in thick volumes of art history. He was interested in traditional Western masters just as much as Japanese calligraphy and Far Eastern tantra art. He increasingly perceived his Jewish Orthodox parental home as a space of confinement and strictness and so eventually broke with his family at the age of 23 to study art in New York. His original interest lay in painting, and he was particularly fascinated by the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart; it was through Pousette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith that Leiter found his way to photography.
Blurred line between painting and photography
Self-taught, Saul Leiter experimented with a 35-mm Leica camera. His fist photographic attempts were still classically in black and white, as was common at the time due to technical reasons. These early black and white shots already reveal the young photographer’s great talent, who would soon become a pioneer in the still young field of colour photography. Leiter’s love for painting remained a defining feature of his work, however; he was someone who wielded the lens like a paintbrush, and his colour photographs in particular are sometimes barely distinguishable from paintings. In the process, Leiter developed a virtuoso understanding of colour and succeeded in elevating colour photography - which was afflicted with the stigma of being a genuine advertising medium – to the heights of art that could be taken seriously. Beyond his first photographic successes, however, he also remained true to painting. His pictures were often abstract, yet bore a striking resemblance to his photographs. One characteristic feature were separating lines that divided the picture into separate areas. Leiter achieved this in his photographs by using window frames, for example.
Fascination for everyday motifs
In contrast to many fellow photographers, Saul Leiter did not place value on photographing significant motifs. He mostly found his subject matter in the local neighbourhood. Raindrops on the window could fascinate him much more than a celebrity. He liked it when people didn’t immediately recognise what he had actually captured with the camera. His angles and perspectives often awakened an abstract surrealist impression and gave his pictures a delicate and indeterminate poetry. Sometimes he even blended photography and painting when he applied watercolour and gouache to his photographs. Sometimes they were spontaneous cutouts, distorted almost beyond recognition in their proximity, sometimes thoughtfully captured compositions of great expressiveness.
A photo pioneer of the 1940s and 1950s
Alongside Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, Leiter was one of the defining figures of the New York School of Photographers in the 1940s and 1950s. Edward Steichen invited him to join his exhibition The Family of Man, which the sometimes-reclusive Leiter however ignored. He worked as fashion photographer for renowned magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Esquire, and others, for 20 years, but remained modest, explaining that he only took photographs so he could pay his bills. However, he experienced such lulls at times, that this was barely possible; with his partner, Soames Bantry, he sometimes was so short of work that neither of them could pay their rent. Saul Leiter’s rediscovery in the 1980s by the British art historian Martin Harrison brought a late comeback - and success returned.
Saul Leiter died in New York on 26 November 2013.
Saul Leiter - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
