by One evening in 1946, Saul Leiter took a train from his native Pittsburgh to New York. At the age of 22, he was leaving behind his family and friends as well as the life set out for him by his father, a highly respected orthodox rabbi, who expected his son to follow in his footsteps. “I walked away from everything he believed in and was interested in,” Leiter would later say, a decision that caused a rift between them that never healed.
Because of that youthful act of self-determination, his family became estranged for a long time, although his mother secretly kept in touch with him. It also started Leiter on a unique creative journey that would culminate 60 years later in his late canonization as one of the most talented and mysterious photographers of the second half of the 20th century.
“Saul lost everything when he moved to New York,” says Anne Morin, curator of Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World, a major retrospective of his work opening soon at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. “But, although he rejected his upbringing, it shaped him as an artist. From the moment he left Pittsburgh, he was someone who did not fit into any community, artistic or otherwise. He lived like a monk in his apartment in New York and led an almost clandestine creative life, uninterested in fame or even recognition.”
In a recently published book, Saul Leiter: The Centenary Retrospective, Leiter sums up his perspective during his many years of obscurity. “I wasn’t ambitious or driven,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I don’t like success like some people do. I was lucky enough to fulfill my ambition not to be successful.”
Like Vivian Maier, the nanny whose secret archive was discovered a few years after her death in 2009, Leiter was shot on the streets of Manhattan. But while she traveled far and wide, he stayed close to home, never venturing beyond a few-block radius of his apartment on East 10th Street. Unlike William Klein’s frenetic, neon-lit city, or Berenice Abbott’s high modernist city, Saul Leiter’s New York is a world of closely observed gestures and details: luminous, otherworldly and strangely serene. There is soft light and warm colors on the streets and buildings, and his use of reflections, blurs and shadows approaches abstraction or dreams. People are partially observed as they pass by cars, or photographed through vertical spaces between buildings or boards. Seen through smeared or steamed windows, they sometimes look like spectral silhouettes.
He captured the city and its people in all seasons, against storefronts brightly painted in the summer sunlight, covered in snow or partially obscured by rain in the harsh New York winter. Often, his subjects are caught in moments of quiet reverie among, but apart from, the noise and hum of the city.
“As a photographer, he’s never been attracted to the idea of New York as the mythical city that never stops,” says Morin. “He was always fighting the small rather than the big, the silence rather than the noise. To him, the city revealed itself in the small details of everyday life, but he wanted to somehow look through the skin of surface reality to see something else, something short-lived but full of meaning.”
Leiter’s secret creative journey began in 1938, at the age of 15, when he began painting and sketching in his spare time between school studies. The following year, his mother gave him a detrola camera, which sparked his interest in the medium he is now known for, but he continued to paint throughout his life. His vast archive contains more than 4,000 pieces of abstract and geometric landscapes, mostly watercolours. At the Milton Keynes gallery, the full range of his work will be on display: black and white as well as color images, fashion photographs, languorously erotic portraits of his longtime partner, Soames Bantry, a former model, and her beautiful friends, as well as his paintings and his painted photographs.
“I’ve deliberately mixed everything together rather than arranging the work into different categories,” says Morin. “Leiter didn’t set out to create an oeuvre, but instead produced all these fragments that continually grew and came together to create this vast end – his unfinished world.”
Arriving in New York as a young man, Leiter slept on park benches before finding a cheap apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. He was friends with the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who became a formative influence, along with the photographer Eugene Smith. During this time, Leiter’s aversion to success was already evident: in the 1950s, he turned down an exhibition offer from an important art dealer, Betty Parsons, whose patronage was sought by other up-and-coming artists. Later in life, he liked to tell the story of how the artist Franz Kline warned him about the smallness of his paintings, who told him: “If you only work a lot, you would you’re one of the boys.”
Leiter’s mind was such that he was never going to be one of the boys, but in the late 1950s and 60s he reluctantly became a fashion photographer for a living, as well as funding his more personal work. The images he created for them Harper’s Bazaar and later for British magazines such as Nova and Man About Town they are charming in their quiet moments, but often seem restrained and less atmospheric than his personal work. An exception is a striking image made for Nova, in which he placed Bantry on a stretch of urban wasteland alongside a small boy, both intently reading comics against the backdrop of abandoned houses. It is deliberately unglamorous and downbeat, and prefigures the casual, low-key approach of a generation of young, edgy photographers who came of age in the 1980s.
In the equally mysterious Bentray, Leiter found a soul mate – someone who had a disinterest in fame and was also a keen painter. They met in 1958, when she came to New York in search of work as a model. For most of their time together they lived in the same building, but in separate apartments, the walls of their workspace covered in oil paintings of flowers and people. “They were two independent souls who had no desire to fit in,” says Morin. “They wanted to be creatively free and embrace life on their own terms. And, they succeeded.” When Bantry died in 2002 they lived together in his flat, where Leiter remained, surrounded by her work, until his death in 2013, aged 89.
It was in the streets around their building that he made the color photographs that he is now remembered for. Their groundbreaking discoveries challenged the history of color photography in America, since Leiter began experimenting with the tonal possibilities of color two decades before the likes of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, whose adoption in the early 1970s led to the This is disputed among critics. and traditional.
In the Milton Keynes show, Morin chose to give the same prominence to his black and white photographs, which she says have “almost completely disappeared into the myth of Saul Leiter”.
That myth has as much to do with the willful nature of his latent creative life as it does with the quiet intelligence of his color photography. Although his work was featured in various group exhibitions in the 1960s and 70s, Leiter did not have a solo exhibition until 1993, when the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York showed some of his black and white photographs.
It wasn’t until ten years later, however, when the same gallery hosted a show called Saul Leiter: Early Color, that his photographs really began to attract attention. A book of the same name, his first monograph, was published the following year, when he was 72 years old. He was blessing the world of photography as a revelatory thing that surprised him because it was there. “I didn’t know and that was very reassuring and pleasant,” he told writer Adam Harrison Levy in 2009. “Now I know, and people want to interview me.”
In Levy’s essay for Saul Leiter: The Centenary Retrospectivehe sees a link between Leiter’s orthodox Jewish upbringing – he described himself as a “rabbinical ghost” – and his quiet, inquisitive approach to photography.
“[Leiter] he retained the last vestiges of his Talmudic schooling, where inquiry and interpretation of texts was taught and encouraged. He adopted that way of questioning the world but he had transposed it to the visual realm: he saw the streets of New York, and its inhabitants, with the narrative insight of a Talmudic scholar. The streets were his text.”
For all the attention he’s received over the last decade of his life, Leiter remains an enigma, a supremely self-effacing artist who walked to his own beat and set out in search of what Morin calls “the discerning moment.” on it every day, on the. same few streets, for almost 60 years.
“I wanted to be unimportant,” he said of his work as a photographer of everyday life. In that, at least, he did not succeed.
• Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 17 February-2 June
• Saul Leiter: The Centenary Retrospective by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo published by Thames & Hudson (£60). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
