Skip to content

Tag: saul leiter

Saul Leiter: No Project, Only Pictures


I missed this when it was posted last month: Brian Dillon on New York photographer Saul Leiter, who died on November 26th, for the London Review of Books blog:

Leiter used cheap film that gave his images a muted quality, and the slowness of the stock made it harder to capture the momentary dramas of the street that Klein or Cartier-Bresson could freeze in fast black and white. Technical constraints cannot, however, quite explain what Leiter did with colour and composition. Time and again in the 1950s he depicts New York under snow, with just a red umbrella or a pair of temporary stop lights to punctuate the dirty white. He used the whitewashed windows of defunct stores to silhouette the odd scurrying figure, little more than a smudge of overcoat, shopping bags or another umbrella – always umbrellas. He was a connoisseur of the effects of condensation.
Comments closed

Teju Cole on Photographer Saul Leiter


Teju Cole, author of Open City and a photographer himself, on the late Saul Leiter at The New Yorker:

The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter’s work is a mystery, even to their creator.

Leiter died aged 89 on Tuesday this week. Read The New York Times obituary.

3 Comments