Harlem 1960. © 2018 Saul Leiter. Book published by Steidl 2018 (8. Edition)
Color is the provenance of the painter, who must select the palette before setting brush to canvas. Color is sensation that shapes mood, as the light waves in color stimulate different emotional centers in the brain. Color is an affect that evokes a response, most alluringly an innate attraction and insatiable curiosity, an ability to be still, even spellbound, held in a gaze, enraptured by the sheer pleasure of hue and shade.
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American photographer Saul Leiter was a master of color, a debt owed in great part to his training as a painter. Born in Pittsburgh in 1923 to Wolf Leiter, the internationally renowned Talmudic scholar, young Saul was intended for the Rabbinate – until his father opposed it. In 1946, he left Cleveland Theological College in 1946 and moved to New York to work as an artist.
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Soon after his arrival, Leiter began to exhibit his paintings in Lower East Side galleries like Tanager Gallery, where they hung alongside those of Philip Guston, Philip Pearlstein and Willem de Kooning. Despite appealing to influential critics, Leiter was not a commercial success, and turned to photography after being introduced to it by abstract expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart.
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Phone Call 1957. © 2018 Saul Leiter. Book published by Steidl 2018 (8. Edition)