Saul Leiter, Thames and Hudson, 2023
Celebrating the centennial of Saul Leiter’s birth, the official retrospective of a revolutionary figure in twentieth-century photography.
Saul Leiter photographed and painted nearly every day for over sixty years, amassing an enormous archive, most of which remained unseen during his lifetime. Finding inspiration within a few blocks of his apartment in Lower Manhattan, he was a master at discovering beauty in the most ordinary places. Celebrated today for his evocative colour photographs of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, which were unknown in their day, Leiter also found success as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. All the while he was shooting black-and-white street scenes on his daily walks, and nudes and intimate portraits back home, while continuing his painting explorations with abstract watercolours, whimsical sketchbooks and painted photographs.
Created in collaboration with the Saul Leiter Foundation, this definitive monograph brings together these diverse yet interconnected bodies of work – including much that was previously unpublished – to reveal the complete artist for the first time.
Featuring essays by Margit Erb, Michael Parillo, Michael Greenberg, Adam Harrison Levy, Lou Stoppard and Asa Hiramatsu.
Stoppard’s text focuses on Leiter’s fashion photography. Title: A Window Covered with Raindrops: Saul Leiter’s Fashion Photography
Published on 26 October 2023
Extract
One can only wonder what Harper’s Bazaar readers of the 1950s and ’60s made of Saul Leiter’s images, so delightfully out of step, as they were, with the dominant style of the times. His was a visual language dedicated to ambiguity, to introspection. But fashion magazines of the mid-twentieth century dealt in conviction. Sustained by a postwar, post-women’s-suffrage buoyancy, fashion editors proposed a contemporary woman who was busy and astute: she knew what she wanted, or at least desired to know what she wanted to a level where she understood that striving for discernment was a virtue in itself. In the images and articles of that era, one sees a particular American confidence—a sense of self-invention, gumption, a pride in the global status of the U.S. in the wake of the war. Each glossy page was a flurry of theories and instructions: evidence of a guiding belief that a sound knowledge of how one should pin one’s hair or assemble a vacation wardrobe could amount to something like self- confidence, self-knowledge.
Most fashion photography from this era is defined by a similar assurance, by a bold energy that verges on confrontational. This is best exemplified by the leading imagemaker of the period, Richard Avedon, who arrived at Harper’s Bazaar in 1944 and, with encouragement from the magazine’s talented art director, Alexey Brodovitch, created a run of remarkable images with unwavering punch. The Harper’s Bazaar woman could look into the eyes of Avedon’s models and feel admiration, pure clean envy, and, in turn, instant reassurance that she had come to the right place, that these women were the examples to follow, that this was the way to be. On the same pages, fashion editor Diana Vreeland offered her own bold assertions that centered fashion, and femininity, as areas one could and should feel sure about. “The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb,” Vreeland famously claimed (the first bikini appeared in Bazaar in 1947, shot by Toni Frissell). It was a culture of appearances, the “performance” of living that Avedon famously described.
Leiter’s vision for Harper’s Bazaar, by contrast, embraced a delicacy that can read as fragile, even melancholic—“apparitional,” as the art historian Max Kozloff put it. His fashion pictures intentionally feel like moments caught, rather than created. During an era defined by the emergence of the fashion photographer as a dominant artistic voice—the origins of the photographer’s status as icon or visionary—Leiter positioned himself as observer, rather than author, a humbleness that fits with the thoughtful hesitancy of his pictures. In his images, we see women’s faces reflected in windows, in mirrors. We see silhouettes bisected by traffic, by passers-by. The pictures are rich in layers and interruptions that favor nuance and complexity over instantaneous impact.