Photograph: Saul Leiter Foundation/Gallery Fifty One Jean Pearson, circa 1948, by Saul Leiter. It all adds up to an intimate portrait of a time, a place and its passing people.
He was constantly alert, too, to the typographical poetry of street signs and lettering stencilled on shop windows. Umbrellas are a recurring motif, their circular geometry irresistibly drawing the eye, like a splash of red or orange in an impressionist painting. He isolates lone human figures in stark relief against snow or rain. Sometimes he shot at night or at twilight, just as the light was fading, so that people appear as ghostly silhouettes against the deep reds and greens of advertising billboards and neon shop signs.
His subjects are stilled in a moment of reverie, waiting at traffic lights or daydreaming in a stalled vehicle. Often he shoots through steamed windows or catches a passing reflection. Instead, what Leiter captures, and heightens, is the atmosphere of another, older Manhattan – an almost sedate place, sometimes suffused with warm summer light, sometimes blanketed by falling snow. This is not the overcrowded, fast-paced New York later caught by the likes of Garry Winogrand or Joel Meyerowitz. Arranged in a single line around the perimeter, each one is a study in form, colour and atmosphere.
In many ways, it is the perfect space for his deeply crafted images: the gallery is in a converted saddler’s that retains an artisanal atmosphere, with its wood-panelled offices and library enclosing a simple square space.Ĭurator Roger Szmulewicz has wisely chosen to lead with Leiter’s signature colour photographs of Manhattan. In Search of Beauty, which is currently drawing hushed and reverent crowds to the newly relocated gallery in Passeig Picasso, is a well-nigh perfect overview of Leiter’s career. In a sublime retrospective at the Foto Colectania gallery in Barcelona, there are 130 answers to that question, almost every one a testament to his singular talent. “What makes them think I’m any good?” he asks. In Tomas Leach’s thoughtful documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Life Lessons With Saul Leiter, he emerges as a reluctant object of attention. Leiter’s late recognition brought him the kind of attention he had long avoided. Photograph: Saul Leiter Foundation/Howard Greenberg Gallery
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