A revised edition of this collection of Saul Leiter’s distinctive work, featuring twelve new photographs.
A new edition of this collection of Saul Leiter's distinctive work, featuring twelve new photographs.

Saul Leiter was one of those photographers who sought neither fame nor commercial success, despite his talent for imagemaking.

Born in Pittsburgh, he spent his entire adult life in New York City's East Village, in an intensely creative environment where ideas from Europe and America came together and intermingled. There he encountered Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, and discovered street photography and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. His mastery of colour is displayed in unconventional cityscapes in which reflections, transparency, complex framing and mirroring effects are married to a very personal printing style, creating a unique kind of urban view.

About the Author:

Max Kozloff is an American art historian, art critic of modern art and photographer. He has been art editor at The Nation and Executive Editor of Artforum.

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monograph brings together these diverse yet interconnected bodies of work – including much that was previously unpublished – to reveal the complete artist for the first time.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

An in-depth look at the entire body of work of one of the outstanding figures in postwar photography

Saul Leiter (1923–2013) 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). This collection reveals the secrets of his appeal, from his masterful colours and compositions to his lyricism and life philosophy.

Over 200 works – including early street photographs, images for advertising, nudes and paintings – cover Leiter’s career from the 1940s onwards, accompanied by quotations from the artist that express his singular world view.

Contents List:

Gallery • The Painter in Saul Leiter, Margit Erb • The New York Nabi, Pauline Vermare Photographs that creep up behind you and tickle your left ear, Motoyuki Shibata • Sources of Saul Leiter quotations • Saul Leiter chronology

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.
Pauline Vermare is Cultural Director at Magnum Photos.
Motoyuki Shibata is a scholar and translator of American literature.

The first sightings of newly discovered work from Saul Leiter’s abundant archive of colour slides

Now widely acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923–2013) remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s, and his work has been drastically re-evaluated over the last two decades. Leiter’s images evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. His complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.

On his death in 2013, he left behind a collection of more than 40,000 colour slides, only a fraction of which had seen the light of day. This book showcases seventy-six newly unearthed images from that extraordinary photographic treasure trove, published here for the first time. Meticulously curated by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation and supported by texts that explain how Leiter built the slide archive and how it is now being explored, catalogued and restored, this monograph will be a must-have for photography fans worldwide.

About the Authors:

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.

A new collection of Saul Leiter's work, much of it published here for the first time.

Saul Leiter remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s, and his work has been drastically re-evaluated over the last two decades. Leiter’s painterly images evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour, at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. His complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.

In recent years, Leiter has been in the spotlight more and more with a series of exhibitions and publications. His studio in New York's East Village, where he had lived since 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation. The foundation has begun a full-scale survey and organization of his more than 80,000 works, with the aim of compiling the ‘complete’ archive. This volume contains works discovered through this process, valuable documents that reveal the secrets of Saul Leiter's creation, unpublished works, popular colour works and black-and-white works that have not been published so far, as well as works that trace the memories of those closest to him taken in private.

As Saul Leiter said, ‘Photographs are often treated as capturing important moments, but they are really small fragments and memories of the world that never ends.’ This is Forever Saul Leiter.

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.
Otake Akiko is the author of several books, including The History of Modern Photos.