One evening in 1946, Saul Leiter boarded a train from his hometown of Pittsburgh to New York. At 22, he was leaving behind his family, his friends, and the life his father, a respected Orthodox rabbi who expected his son to follow in his footsteps, had carved out for him. “I turned away from everything he believed in and valued,” Leiter would later say; This decision caused a rift between them that could never heal.
This act of self-determination during his youth led to long periods of estrangement from his family, although his mother kept in touch with him secretly. It also launched Leiter on a unique creative journey that would culminate in his belated canonization nearly 60 years later as one of the most gifted and enigmatic photographers of the second half of the 20th century.
“Saul lost everything when he moved to New York,” says Anne Morin, curator of Saul Leiter: The Unfinished World, which opens soon at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. “But even though he rejected his upbringing, it shaped him as an artist. From the moment he left Pittsburgh he was someone who didn’t fit into any community, artistic or otherwise. He lived like a hermit in his New York apartment and led an almost secret creative life with no interest in fame or even recognition.”
In a recently published book, Saul Leiter: Centennial RetrospectiveLeiter summarizes his perspective during many years of obscurity. “I wasn’t ambitious or driven,” he says matter-of-factly. “I don’t admire success like some people. “I was lucky to be able to fulfill my passion to fail.”
Like nanny Vivian Maier, whose secret archive was discovered several years after her death in 2009, Leiter shot guns on the streets of Manhattan. Yet while he wandered far and wide, she stayed close to home, never moving beyond a several-block radius of her apartment on East 10th Street. Unlike William Klein’s frenetic, neon-lit city or Berenice Abbott’s towering modernist metropolis, Saul Leiter’s New York is a world of close observation of gesture and detail: luminous, otherworldly, and strangely serene. Streets and buildings are bathed in soft light and warm colors; The use of reflections, blur, and shadow approach the abstract or dreamlike. People are partially visible in passing cars or photographed in vertical spaces between buildings or billboards. They sometimes appear like ghostly silhouettes when viewed through smeared or fogged windows.
He captured the city and its people in all seasons, in front of brightly painted storefronts under the summer sun, covered in snow, or partially obscured by rain in New York’s harsh winter. Most often, the subjects are immersed in quiet daydreams, amidst the noise and hum of the city, but outside of them.
“As a photographer, he was never seduced by the idea that New York was a mythical city that never stopped,” says Morin. “He was always attuned to the small rather than the large, the quiet rather than the noise. For him, the city revealed itself in the small details of daily life, but he also wanted to somehow peer into the outer shell of surface reality to see something else, something fleeting but full of meaning.
Leiter’s secret creative journey began in 1938, at the age of 15, when he began painting and sketching in his spare time between schoolwork. The following year his mother gave him a Detrola camera, which sparked his interest in the profession for which he is now best known, but he continued painting throughout his life. His extensive archive contains more than 4,000 abstract pieces and geometric landscapes, mostly watercolors. His full body of work will be on display at the Milton Keynes gallery: color images as well as black and white, fashion photographs, swooningly erotic portraits of his long-term partner, former model Soames Bantry, and her beautiful friends. such as his paintings and overpainted photographs.
“Instead of organizing the work into different categories, I intentionally brought everything together,” says Morin. “Leiter had no intention of creating a work, but instead produced all these pieces that were constantly growing and coming together to form this huge territory, his own unfinished world.”
When he arrived in New York as a young man, Leiter slept on park benches before finding a cheap apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. He befriended the photographer Eugene Smith, as well as the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was a formative influence. During this time, Leiter’s dislike of success was already clear: in the 1950s, he turned down an exhibition offer from Betty Parsons, a prominent art dealer whose patronage was sought by other up-and-coming artists. Later in his life, he liked to tell how the artist Franz Kline warned him about the smallness of his paintings. Kline told him: “If you had gone big, you would have been one of those boys.”
Leiter’s temperament was never going to be one of those boys, but during the late 1950s and ’60s he reluctantly became a fashion photographer both to survive and to finance his more personal work. The images he created for her Harper’s Bazaar and later for British magazines Nova And About Man City they are fascinating in their quiet subversion, but often seem constrained and altogether less atmospheric than his personal works. An exception is a striking image made for this. NovaIt featured Bantry posing with a young child in an urban dump; They were both intently reading comics against the backdrop of abandoned houses. It’s deliberately understated and old-fashioned, and prefigures the casual, stripped-down approach of a generation of young, edgy photographers who came of age in the 1980s.
In the equally mysterious Bantry, Leiter found a soulmate who shared his disinterest in fame and was also an ambitious painter. They met in 1958 when she had just arrived in New York looking for work as a model. They spent most of their time together living in the same building but in separate apartments; The walls of her workspace were covered with her oil paintings of flowers and people. “They were two independent souls with no desire to conform,” Morin says. “They wanted to be creatively free and embrace life on their own terms. And they did it.” When Bantry died in 2002, they were living together in Leiter’s flat, where he remained surrounded by his work until his death in 2013, aged 89.
He took the colorful photographs for which he is now remembered in the streets surrounding his buildings. Considering that Leiter began experimenting with the tonal possibilities of color two decades before the likes of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who sparked great controversy among critics in the early 1970s, their belated discoveries challenged the history of color photography in America. and traditionalists.
In the Milton Keynes exhibition, Morin chose to give equal importance to his black and white photographs, which “are almost absent from the Saul Leiter myth”.
This legend is as much about the dogged nature of his secret creative life as it is about the quiet daring of his color photography. Although his work was featured occasionally in various group exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s, Leiter did not have a solo exhibition until 1993, when some of his black-and-white photographs were exhibited at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.
But his photographs really began to attract attention a decade later, when the same gallery hosted an exhibition called Saul Leiter: Early Color. His first monograph, the book of the same name, was published the following year, when he was 72 years old. This book was hailed as enlightening by the photography world, who were surprised by its existence. “I used to be unknown, and it was very comforting and enjoyable,” writer Adam Harrison told Levy in 2009. “Now I’m known and people want to interview me.”
In Levy’s article Saul Leiter: Centennial RetrospectiveHe sees a connection between Leiter’s orthodox Jewish upbringing (he once described himself as a “rabbi ghost”) and his quiet, inquisitive approach to photography.
“[Leiter] It preserved the last vestiges of Talmudic education, in which inquiry and interpretation of texts were taught and developed. He had internalized this way of questioning the world, but he transferred it to the visual field: He saw the streets and inhabitants of New York with the narrative sense of a Talmud scholar. The streets were his text.”
For all the attention he received in the last decade of his life, Leiter remains an enigma; a very self-effacing artist who walks to his own beat and goes out every day in search of what Morin calls the “sharp moment.” The same few streets for almost 60 years.
“I aspired to be insignificant,” he said of his working life as a photographer of the everyday sublime. At least she failed in this regard.
• Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 17 February-2 June
• Saul Leiter: Centennial Retrospective Written by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo, it is published by Thames & Hudson (£60). To support Guardian And Observer Order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply