Saul Leiter: a brief biography

Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburg, where he was introduced to art through books in the municipal library. Having exhibited his paintings at the Ten Thirty Gallery in Cleveland, the Outlines Gallery in Pittsburgh and the Gump department store in San Francisco, he left in 1946, against his father’s will (a well-known rabbi) and moved to New York, where he became a painter.

He was also very interested in photography, taking pictures of the streets in his district. In 1947 after visiting a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the MoMA, he decided to devote himself completely to photography: black & white, then colour.

His black & white series "The Wedding as a Funeral" was published in LIFE in 1951.

His meeting with Edward Steichen, Artistic Director of Vanity Fair and Vogue, was decisive.

He exhibited twice at the MoMA and started working in fashion photography. His work was then published in ELLE, LIFE, Nova, Vogue and Queen.

With no formal training, he walked freely around Paris and New York, building up a very personal style, with often complex and subtle photos made up of light and shade in which his talent as a painter is clearly visible.

Exhibition

"Leiter is a rare artist, one whose vision is so encompassing, so refined, so in touch with a certain lyrical undertone, that his best photographs occasionally seem literally to transcend the medium." Jane Livingston

House of Photography at Deichtorhallen will from February 3 to April 15, 2012 be highlighting the oeuvre of 88-year-old photographer and painter Saul Leiter in the world’s first major retrospective. The exhibition covers more than 400 works and brings together in marvelous combination his early black-and-white and color photographs, fashion images, painted- over nude photographs, paintings and his sketchbooks, which have never gone on public view before. Then final chapter in the exhibition is dedicated to Saul Leiter’s most recent photographic works, which he continues to take on the streets in his neighborhood in New York’s East Village.

Further information about the exhibition.

Saul Leiter products published by Nouvelles Images

Nouvelles Images is publishing a series of postcards and prints of Saul Leiter.