SAUL LEITER

The American artist Saul Leiter (1923–2013) became enchanted by painting and photography as a teenager in Pittsburgh. After he relocated to New York City in 1946, his visionary imagination and tireless devotion to artistic practice pushed him to become one of the iconic photographers of the mid-twentieth century. An innate sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student of art of all kinds, and he retained his spirit of exploration and spontaneity throughout his long career, in both his fashion images and his personal work.

 

Leiter began experimenting with color photography in New York in the late 1940s, using slide film such as Kodachrome. The 2006 release of his first monograph, Early Color, revealed radically innovative compositions and a groundbreaking mastery of color that permanently changed the history of photography. Though Leiter sometimes defended the use of color in fine-art photography, he refused to analyze or explain his own work. “I don’t have a philosophy,” Leiter said. “I have a camera.”