Saul Leiter: Color, reflections, and transparency
This second article on color photographers looks at the work of Saul Leiter. His color urban landscape work in New York in the 1950s is truly remarkable for its composition and for his early use of color at a time when black-and-white was considered the only medium for artistic photography.
Leiter was born in December 1923 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Leiter’s father was a Talmudic scholar, and he also studied to become a rabbi. Unhappy in Pittsburgh, he moved to New York to become an artist. Initially focused on painting, he became drawn to photography. Edward Steichen included some of Leiter’s early black-and-white photographs in an exhibition titled “Always the Stranger” at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Leiter recalled that his images were just tacked to the walls, and not beautifully framed as images are exhibited now.