Even after the plaudits started to rain down after the publication of his now essential book, “Early Color” in 2006, Saul Leiter was a reluctant legend. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Pittsburgh in 1923, Leiter was expected to follow in the religious footsteps of his father, a rabbi. But he had other ideas and gravitated toward the arts. In 1946, he moved to New York to start a life as an artist, where he lived until his death in 2013.
Though he was famed for his color photography, Saul Leiter’s earliest work was in black-and-white, and just as personal and powerful as his later images.
Saul Leiter was famed for his richly hued color photographs. Yet when he first came to Howard Greenberg’s attention, it was his black-and-white street photos that stunned the New York gallery owner, who immediately gave him a one-man show.
Saul Leiter Saul Leiter, a color photographer’s color photographer, died a week ago today. I suspect he’ll be one of those photographers we learn more about as time passes, rather than less; he strikes me as a figure who will…
I suspect he’ll be one of those photographers we learn more about as time passes, rather than less; he strikes me as a figure who will be known a century from now, once all the claims and pretenses and strivings of more effortful reputations have had a chance to fall away.
American photographer Saul Leiter died on Tuesday 26 November in New York, according to Roger Szmulewicz at Fifty One Fine Art Photography in Antwerp, Belgium. Leiter, who was 89, had been ill for the past three to four weeks, Szmulewicz tells BJP. ‘I spo
Max Kozloff said to me one day, ‘You’re not really a photographer. You do photography, but you do it for your own purposes – your purposes are not the same as others’. I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I like that. I like the way he put it
No, they did not. My mother thought I could be a rabbi and still paint on the third floor. “Who would know?” she would say. My father thought photography was done by lowlifes. My family was very unhappy about my becoming a photographer—profoundly and deeply unhappy. That’s not what they wanted for me, but I don’t want to go into it.
