Original Saul Leiter Silver Gelatin Fashion Photo 1510-13

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Original Saul Leiter Silver Gelatin Fashion Photo 1510-13

About the Item

Original Saul Leiter (1923-2013) silver gelatin photo with Leiter's studio stamp verso. Overall measurements are 11" x 14" and the image size is 9.13" x 13.5". Very good condition; minor stain verso, but does not appear on the front. Loose and unmounted. Heavy duty, double stock photo paper. AskArt bio: New York at Mid-Century was a monochrome town, or so its best-known documentarians would have us believe. But where eminent photographers like Weegee, Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon captured the city most often in clangorous, sharp-edged black and white, Saul Leiter saw it as a quiet polychrome symphony — the glow of neon, the halos of stoplights, the golden blur of taxis — a visual music that few of his contemporaries seemed inclined to hear. One of the first professionals to photograph New York City regularly in color, Mr. Leiter, who died on Tuesday at 89, was among the foremost art photographers of his time, despite the fact that his work was practically unknown to the general public. Of the tens of thousands of images he shot — many now esteemed as among the finest examples of street photography in the world — most remain unprinted. Trained first as a rabbi and then as a painter, Mr. Leiter the photographer spent the last 60 years being cyclically forgotten and rediscovered. In the end he remained very nearly the antithesis of a household name, a state of affairs that, with his lifelong craving for privacy and genial constitutional dyspepsia, he found hugely satisfying. "In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined," Mr. Leiter said in an interview for a monograph published in Germany in 2008. "One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it." Mr. Leiter (pronounced LIGHT-er), under some protest, came to renewed attention in recent years. In 2005 his early color photography was the subject of a well-received exhibition at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan; in 2006 an illustrated book, Saul Leiter: Early Color,"with a foreword by the art historian Martin Harrison, helped make it even more widely known. That year, the Milwaukee Art Museum mounted the first solo museum exhibition of Mr. Leiter's color images; exhibitions followed at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and elsewhere. A feature-length documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter, by the British filmmaker Tomas Leach, was released this year to glowing notices. It has been shown at film festivals throughout the United States and Europe, including the DocNYC festival in Manhattan this month. All this left Mr. Leiter bemused, bothered and at most slightly pleased. "What makes anyone think that I'm any good?" he says in Mr. Leach's film. "I'm not carried away by the greatness of Mr. Leiter." But others were. "He is one of the most important early color photographers of the 20th century," Lisa Hostetler, the newly appointed curator of photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, said in an interview on Tuesday. "The images he made communicated the sense of rhythm and movement and being caught up in the city." Mr. Leiter was considered a member of the New York School of photographers — the circle that included Weegee and Arbus and Avedon — and yet he was not quite of it. He was largely self-taught, and his work resembles no one else's: tender, contemplative, quasi-abstract and intensely concerned with color and geometry, it seems as much as anything to be about the essential condition of perceiving the world. "Seeing is a neglected enterprise," Mr. Leiter often said. Where other New York photographers of the period were apt to document the city's elements discretely — streets, people, buildings — Mr. Leiter captured the almost indefinable spaces where all three intersect, many of them within a two-block radius of the East Village apartment in which he had lived since the early 1950s. "Lots of people we think of as the famous photographers, particularly American photographers of the time, their photos are about something, quite overtly," Mr. Leach, the filmmaker, said in an interview on Wednesday. "Saul's were much more oblique than that." Unplanned and unstaged, Mr. Leiter's photographs are slices fleetingly glimpsed by a walker in the city. People are often in soft focus, shown only in part or absent altogether, though their presence is keenly implied. Sensitive to the city's found geometry, he shot by design around the edges of things: vistas are often seen through rain, snow or misted windows. "A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person," Mr. Leiter says in "In No Great Hurry." Mr. Leiter's color is sometimes dramatic but is frequently browned-out and muted, an effect he achieved by using film — typically 35-millimeter Kodachrome — that was past its sell-by date. He often shot reflections in plate glass, which let him, without darkroom trickery, produce multiply layered images in a single exposure. To look at one of Mr. Leiter's photographs, critics agree, is to see something warm, intimate, fragile, very beautiful and intensely personal. In an untitled image from the 1950s, Mr. Leiter captured the pointed tip and downward-curving ribs of a deep pink umbrella; wide open and misted with rain, it resembles nothing so much as a dewy ripe fig. In Mondrian Worker (1954), he turns a representational scene into pure abstraction, shooting a construction site at which a workman is framed by flat panels of colored wood. Mr. Leiter's Red Umbrella (1967) is de facto black and white, showing an expanse of ashy city snow. But in an upper corner, like the first cardinal of spring, comes a breathtaking flash: a sliver of a red umbrella, held aloft by an unseen passer-by, with a thin slice of red coat below it, barely caught at the edge of the frame. "He broke all the rules when it came to composing a photograph," said Mr. Leiter's assistant, Margit Erb, who confirmed his death, at his home. "He put things into the abstract, he paid attention to color, he threw foregrounds out of focus, which made the photographs feel very voyeuristic. He applied a painterly mentality that the photography world had not seen." After spending his early career shooting in black and white, Mr. Leiter took up color in the late 1940s, decades before most other art photographers were using it. "Color wasn't really accepted as an artistic medium at that time," Ms. Hostetler said. "Because of the nature of the development of the technology of color photography, the association in people's minds was with commercial or amateur photography." With no art market for color photos, Mr. Leiter earned his living as a fashion photographer for magazines such as Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. His work in those pages looks nothing like other commercial images of the period: models' faces are often partly obscured; a featured product — a pair of shoes, for instance — might be shown half in shadow. Mr. Leiter made few prints of his art photographs: it was enough for him, he said, to show slides of them to small gatherings of friends, projecting the images onto his living room wall. He roamed the streets daily with his camera, and he continued to paint. In some works he merged the two mediums, adding layers of paint atop his already layered photographic images. And so things went, for six decades. For all that time, Mr. Leiter remained virtually unknown, "partly by choice, partly by happenstance," Mr. Leach said on Wednesday. "So many photographers, they go out of their way to publicize themselves and to search out success," he added. "Saul never did it. He photographed because he loved taking photographs." Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh on Dec. 3, 1923, a scion of a dynastic rabbinic family that stretched back hundreds of years. His father, Wolf, a rabbi, an eminent Talmud scholar and a leader of Pittsburgh's Orthodox Jewish community, charted a similar course for Saul. But in the mid-1940s, after studying for the rabbinate at a Cleveland seminary, the younger Mr. Leiter left without graduating and moved to New York to be a painter — a choice, he said, that deeply displeased his family. In Manhattan, he worked with the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who also encouraged him to explore photography. This turn displeased his family even more. "My father thought photography was done by lowlifes," Mr. Leiter said in a 2009 interview with the website Photographers Speak. "My family was very unhappy about my becoming a photographer — profoundly and deeply unhappy." In 1953, the eminent photographer Edward Steichen included some of Mr. Leiter's photographs in the exhibition "Always the Young Strangers" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mr. Leiter was pleased, he said afterward, though the achievement did not impress him overmuch. Mr. Steichen next asked Mr. Leiter to have his work included in "The Family of Man"; that exhibition, which Mr. Steichen curated at MoMA in 1955, featured some 500 photographs assembled from a pool of two million. For its evocative exploration of the human condition, the exhibition came to be considered seminal. Mr. Leiter, insufficiently impressed with his own work, turned him down. Some of Mr. Leiter's photographs did find their way into museum collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, though the overwhelming majority exist only as slides or negatives, stacked in his apartment in a towering cityscape of cardboard boxes. The apartment also brims with Mr. Leiter's paintings — mostly semiabstract, intensely colored images in gouache or watercolor. "I have the largest collection of Saul Leiters in the world," he told Photographers Speak. Mr. Leiter's companion of more than half a century, Soames Bantry, died in 2002; Ms. Bantry, an artist and model, was the subject of many of his photographs and paintings. Survivors include a brother, Abba. His work was featured prominently in the 1992 book The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963, by Jane Livingston, and was the subject of a 2008 book, Saul Leiter, with an introduction by Max Kozloff. In the interview with Photographers Speak, Mr. Leiter set his role as a photographer against the backdrop of far more vital human events. "I am not immersed in self-admiration," he said. "When I am listening to Vivaldi or Japanese music or making spaghetti at 3 in the morning and realize that I don't have the proper sauce for it, fame is of no use."

Creator:
Saul Leiter (Photographer)
Dimensions:
Height: 13.5 in (34.29 cm)Width: 9.13 in (23.2 cm)Depth: 0.1 in (2.54 mm)
Style:
Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Paper
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
1960-1969
Date of Manufacture:
circa 1960
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use. Softened corners and a minor stain verso that does not show on the front.
Seller Location:
Garnerville, NY
Reference Number:
Seller: ARJM01.29.17.31stDibs: LU123626511023

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