By Alexander Stone
Art of Saul Leiter
There is a certain kind of artist who operates not as a conduit for the zeitgeist, but as a quiet, and often stubborn, act of resistance against it. The American photographer and painter Saul Leiter was such an artist. In an age that was beginning to fall in love with the loud, the brash, and the declarative, Leiter chose to whisper. And in his quiet, and often beautifully, elusive photographs, we can see a testament to the idea that the most profound art is often the art that is least interested in being seen.
As a curator, I have spent a lifetime with the grand, and often deafening, narratives of art history. And I have come to see that the most interesting, and most necessary, work is often done in the margins, in the quiet, and often overlooked, corners of the creative world. Saul Leiter was a man who lived his entire life in these margins. And in doing so, he created a body of work that is not just a collection of beautiful images, but a powerful, and deeply necessary, argument for a different way of seeing, a different way of being, in the world.
A Painter with a Camera
To understand Leiter’s photography, you have to understand that he was, first and foremost, a painter. He came to New York in the 1940s not to take pictures, but to paint them. And when he did pick up a camera, a Leica, he did so with the eye of a painter, not a documentarian. He was not interested in capturing the “decisive moment,” the great, and often theatrical, drama of the street. He was interested in something quieter, more subtle, more elusive.
He was a master of the found abstraction, of the way a splash of colour on an umbrella, seen through a rain-streaked window, could become a kind of urban Impressionism. He was influenced not by the hard, and often brutal, realism of his photographic contemporaries, but by the gentle, and often melancholic, beauty of the French Impressionists and the Japanese ukiyo-e masters. His photographs are not about the city; they are about the feeling of the city. They are about the quiet, and often lonely, poetry of a life lived in the midst of a crowd.
The Heresy of Colour
It is hard, in our own, hyper-saturated, and often garish, visual world, to understand just how radical Leiter’s use of colour was. In the mid-20th century, black and white was the language of serious photography. It was the language of art, of truth, of a kind of moral and aesthetic purity. Colour was the language of the commercial, of the advertisement, of the family snapshot. It was, in a word, vulgar.
Leiter, with his painter’s eye, saw the world differently. He saw that colour was not just a decorative element; it was an emotional one. He saw that the world was not a series of black and white truths, but a beautiful, and often messy, and deeply, and wonderfully, colourful place. And in his embrace of colour, he was not just making a technical choice; he was making a philosophical one. He was making a case for a more complex, more nuanced, and more, in a word, human, way of seeing the world.
He experimented with different kinds of film, with Kodachrome, with Ektachrome, with expired film that would produce strange, and often beautiful, and entirely unpredictable, results. He was not interested in a perfect, and technically flawless, representation of the world. He was interested in a beautiful, and often deeply personal, one. He was not just a photographer; he was a poet of the chemical, of the analogue, of the beautiful, and often fragile, materiality of the photographic image.
The Art of Disappearing
For all his undeniable genius, Leiter was a man who had no interest in being a genius. He was a deeply private, and often reclusive, figure. He worked as a fashion photographer for magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, but he never considered himself a part of the industry. He preferred to work on his own terms, to pursue his own, quiet, and often deeply personal, vision.
He rarely exhibited his work. He stored most of his negatives and slides in boxes in his apartment. He was, in a sense, a man who was actively trying to disappear. “I spent a great deal of my life being ignored,” he once said. “I was always very happy that way.”
This is not the statement of a bitter, and resentful, artist. It is the statement of a man who understood, with a profound, and almost Zen-like, clarity, that the real work of an artist has nothing to do with fame, with recognition, with the noisy, and often soul-crushing, business of the art world. The real work is the quiet, and often solitary, business of seeing. And in his refusal to play the game, in his quiet, and deeply radical, act of disappearance, he was, in a sense, performing his most profound, and most necessary, work of art.
The Unlikely Resurrection
And then, in the 1990s, a strange, and beautiful, thing happened. The world, which had for so long ignored him, began to find him. A new generation of curators, of gallerists, of photographers, began to see in his quiet, and often beautifully, elusive photographs, a kind of magic, a kind of truth, that was all too often missing from the loud, and often empty, spectacle of the contemporary art world.
His first monograph, Saul Leiter: Early Color, published in 2006, became an instant classic. A documentary film, In No Great Hurry, offered a glimpse into his quiet, and often deeply philosophical, world. And in the final years of his life, he was, at last, recognised for what he had always been: one of the great, and most original, photographers of the 20th century.
Saul Leiter is an artist who reminds us that the most powerful art is not always the most spectacular. It is the art that is born from a place of quiet, and deep, and unwavering, honesty. It is the art that is not trying to shout, but that is, instead, inviting us to listen. It is the art that is not trying to be seen, but that is, instead, teaching us how to see. And in a world that is so often defined by the loud, and the certain, and the spectacular, his quiet, and beautiful, and deeply, and wonderfully, uncertain, photographs are a profound, and deeply necessary, act of grace. He was a man who spent his life looking at the world. And in his quiet, and beautiful, and deeply, and wonderfully, human, photographs, he has given us a new, and more beautiful, way to see it. And for that, we should be profoundly grateful.
