Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective

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monograph brings together these diverse yet interconnected bodies of work – including much that was previously unpublished – to reveal the complete artist for the first time.

About the Authors:

Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh. He pioneered a painterly approach to colour photography in the 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s. The publication in 2006 of his first collection, Early Color, inspired an avid ‘rediscovery’ that has since led to worldwide exhibitions and the release of a documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2013). He died in New York in 2013.
Margit Erb is the founder and director of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving Leiter’s art and legacy.
Michael Parillo is the Associate Director of the Saul Leiter Foundation.