About one of the most beautiful photo books of the last ten years

Saul Leit­er. Ret­ro­spek­tive. Kat­a­log zur Ausstel­lung im Haus der Pho­togra­phie, Deich­torhallen Ham­burg, 2012.

“To be ignored is a great priv­i­lege.” In the years before his death in 2013 at the lat­est, some great exhi­bi­tions took away this priv­i­lege from Saul Leit­er, who wrote this sen­tence. Sor­ry Saul.

I still remem­ber how we went to the small but very fine Galerie Springer in Char­lot­ten­burg the day after Leiter’s death and looked at the won­der­ful lit­tle exhi­bi­tion “WORKS 1949 – 1960 – Pho­tog­ra­phy and Works on Paper”.

Any­one who missed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to get to know Leiter’s work in one of the exhi­bi­tions can catch up on it: on the one hand in the high­ly rec­om­mend­ed pho­to books „Ear­ly Col­or” and „Ear­ly Black and White”, but also in the vol­ume that was pub­lished for the ret­ro­spec­tive in Ham­burg in 2012. The cura­tors of the exhi­bi­tion, Ingo Taub­horn and Brigitte Wois­chnik, pub­lished the splen­did book – “Saul Leit­er. Ret­ro­spec­tive”- and it’s still avail­able today.

With the selec­tion of texts by well-known authors and the com­pi­la­tion of images from all of his cre­ative direc­tions, the edi­tors intend to explain to us why we would do well to ignore Leiter’s wish to remain hid­den: With the dis­cov­ery of his pho­to­graph­ic work, accord­ing to the authors, the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy had to be rewrit­ten.

But let’s start from the begin­ning. In his brief bio­graph­i­cal overview, Ingo Taub­horn describes how Leit­er was born in 1923 in Pitts­burgh, Penn­syl­va­nia, into a very reli­gious, Jew­ish envi­ron­ment; his father want­ed him to become a rab­bi. But he escaped from this world – to New York, into the fine arts – and into pho­tog­ra­phy. He devot­ed him­self to black and white pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ed, began to pho­to­graph in col­or. But only as a fash­ion pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Harper’s Bazaar fash­ion mag­a­zine did he tem­porar­i­ly achieve a cer­tain lev­el of noto­ri­ety.

That sounds like the biog­ra­phy of an artist, as there may have been tens of thou­sands in New York. Because nobody, per­haps not even Saul Leit­er him­self, rec­og­nized what the book proves with con­vinc­ing exam­ples: His pho­to­graph­ic work is a sen­sa­tion. In the 1940s, pho­tog­ra­phy was hard­ly con­sid­ered an art form. It served most­ly doc­u­men­tary and jour­nal­is­tic pur­pos­es, was lit­tle more than a craft.

Leit­er changed the pur­pose of pho­tog­ra­phy and raised it to the pedestal of art. “Saul Leit­er is the painter among street pho­tog­ra­phers,” writes Rolf Nobel, and he explains how Leit­er dif­fers from the French and Amer­i­can founders of street pho­tog­ra­phy: in his pho­tographs, Leit­er avoid­ed the nar­ra­tive and the doc­u­men­tary. Instead, his imagery is shaped by frag­ments and impres­sions, mix­ing ele­ments of every­day life with abstract sur­faces and shapes.

He shows a world of sur­faces – and he expands, as Ulrich Rüter writes, “the view of an explo­ration of think­ing and feel­ing.” All of this con­tributes to the fact that his pic­tures refuse to pro­vide clear expla­na­tions. They cause con­fu­sion, are mys­te­ri­ous, lyri­cal, poet­ic: „I like it when you are not sure what you are see­ing,” says Leit­er.

But the authors sur­prise us even more in the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Leit­ers col­or pho­tographs in the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy: A few years ago, artis­tic col­or pho­tog­ra­phy (as a tech­nique it has been around for a sur­pris­ing­ly long time: since the mid­dle of the 19^th cen­tu­ry) began with names like William Eggle­ston, Diane Arbus and Stephen Shore.

Leit­er began doing this more than 20 years ear­li­er, in 1948. Influ­enced, for exam­ple, by the action paint­ing of Jack­son Pol­lock or the col­or field paint­ing by Mark Rothko, mono­chrome areas of col­or, col­ored objects – traf­fic signs, umbrel­las, cars – shape the com­po­si­tion of his pho­tographs.

The excit­ing selec­tion of his pho­tographs and paint­ings – some of the „clas­sics” that could be seen in the book „Ear­ly Col­or” pub­lished by Stei­dl in 2006 have been omit­ted here – pro­vides a deep insight into all aspects of the artis­tic work of Leit­er: his black and white pho­tog­ra­phy, col­or pho­tog­ra­phy, fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ing. Two sketch­books, which were inte­grat­ed into the book in small for­mat, are won­der­ful too. The texts by Ingo Taub­horn, Adam Har­ri­son Levy, Ulrich Rüter, Vince Alet­ti, Car­rie Springer, Rolf Nobel and Brigitte Wois­chnik illu­mi­nate the var­i­ous aspects of Saul Leiter’s work in a knowl­edge­able man­ner and are well worth read­ing.

But two texts touched me the most: On the one hand, “Fri­days with Saul” by Mar­git Erb, an employ­ee of the Howard Green­berg Gallery in New York, which was large­ly respon­si­ble for the dis­cov­ery of Leiter’s work. Erb describes her vis­its to Leiter’s Man­hat­tan apart­ment, where he has lived for decades and which she describes as a haunt­ed place. She describes his humor, his sar­casm, his charm, his weird­ness, but also his every­day life and her work with him when look­ing at pic­tures with great sym­pa­thy.

On the oth­er hand, there is “Homage to Soames Bantry”, a touch­ing and warm-heart­ed text by Saul Leit­er him­self about his long­time part­ner, the great love of his life, an artist who nev­er real­ly received recog­ni­tion and who died in 2002. Leit­er was allowed to choose some of Soames Bantry’s works and present them both in the Ham­burg exhi­bi­tion and in the book accom­pa­ny­ing the exhi­bi­tion.

“We take our­selves too seri­ous­ly. We’re not impor­tant enough to deserve that much atten­tion, ” he once said. His plan to „just sink into obliv­ion” almost suc­ceed­ed.

Ingo Taub­horn, Brigitte Wois­chnik (eds.): Saul Leit­er. Ret­ro­spek­tive. Kat­a­log zur Ausstel­lung im Haus der Pho­togra­phie, Deich­torhallen Ham­burg, 2012.. Ger­man Eng­lish. 296 pages. Kehrer Ver­lag, Hei­del­berg, Berlin 2012.

This text was first pub­lished by kwerfeldein.de in its orig­i­nal form.