From November 15, 2025 to January 18, 2026, the San Gaetano Cultural Center in Padua will host Saul Leiter. A Window Dotted with Raindrops, a major exhibition dedicated to one of the 20th century’s finest masters of photography. Produced by Vertigo Syndrome in collaboration with diChroma photography, the Saul Leiter Foundation and under the patronage of the Municipal Administration of Padua, the exhibition is curated by Anne Morin and brings together an impressive body of work that restores all the complexity of a shy, lyrical and profoundly modern artist.
The exhibition brings together 126 black-and-white photographs, including vintage and modern prints, 40 color photographs, 42 paintings, five original vintage magazines and a film document. It is a broad path that traverses Leiter’s diverse languages-from street photography to painting to fashion images-to compose a coherent and intimate portrait of an author who transformed the ordinary into vision.
The exhibition project was created with the intention of restoring to the public the poetic and conceptual value of Leiter’s work, highlighting his formal choices and his ability to redefine the language of photography during the 20th century. The installation, conceived as an immersive and participatory experience, invites visitors to observe the world through the artist’s gaze. Lights, angles and perspectives are designed to reproduce his framing and compositional methods, creating opportunities to directly experience his approach of reflections, transparencies and visual fragments.
While many postwar photographers sought to depict the grandeur of the American metropolis, Saul Leiter preferred to focus on the invisible. His subjects - passersby in the rain, colored umbrellas, cabs glimpsed through fogged glass - render a rarefied, almost dreamy New York. Instead of celebrating modernity and urban power, Leiter sought poetry in the everyday, transfiguring minute details into forms of beauty.
As curator Anne Morin explains, “Leiter reveled in what he saw. He was not interested in the hegemonic character of New York or its monstrous modernity. He invented optical games, interweaving shapes and planes that conceal and reveal what is hidden in the intervals, in the vicinity, in the invisible margins.” His photography, far from the documentary approach of his contemporaries, takes the form of short, dazzling visual writing, similar to a haiku. Short appearances that, in the time of a blink of an eye, condense emotion and mystery.
In the 1940s, at a time when color photography was considered commercial or frivolous, Leiter began to experiment with its expressive potential. His color images, made beginning in 1948 with Kodachrome film, anticipated the acceptance of color in art photography by decades. Far from the quest for sharpness and precision, Leiter favored the softness of contours, reflections and blurs, turning rain, fogged glass and curtains into true compositional tools.
This revolutionary vision led him to collaborate with some of the leading international magazines. After early work for Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, his career continued with such titles as Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen and Nova. During those years, his fashion images were distinguished by their intimate tone and delicate color, far removed from the prevailing spectacularity.
The Padua exhibition also restores the painterly dimension of his work. Leiter, in fact, was a painter before he was a photographer, and his view of reality stems precisely from a sensibility formed in the visual arts. His photographs are constructed like paintings, with a focus on composition, color and light. “I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera,” Leiter said. I look through the lens and shoot. My photographs are only a small part of what I see and what could be photographed. They are fragments of infinite possibilities."
Annoyed and refractory to fame, Leiter printed only a portion of his work. Much of the negatives remained unpublished until his death, revealing a universe of intimate and poetic images. In 2018, five years after his passing, a series of black-and-white nudes made in the late 1940s and early 1960s also emerged, works that chronicle his most personal and private quest.
Her work reflects a secret order, a suspended balance combining reality and dream. For Anne Morin, “Leiter’s images last as long as the blink of an eye, positioned on the edge of something. They are short, fragmented forms, like annotations of reality, made with a mastery and metrics reminiscent of haiku. His gesture is that of a calligrapher: quick, precise, unapologetic.”
Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, the son of a rabbi. He abandoned his religious studies to pursue art and in 1946 moved to New York City, where he came into contact with artists such as Richard Pousette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith. From the beginning he experimented with 35 mm photography, capturing friends and passersby around the East Village. After a long stint in the fashion world, he lived for two decades in silence, away from the spotlight.
His rediscovery came in 2006 with the publication of the volume Early Color, which established him as a pioneer of color photography and a key figure in modern photography. His works are now held in major international museums, from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Saul Leiter died in New York City on November 26, 2013. “Of the tens of thousands of images he took,” wrote Margalit Fox in the New York Times, “most remain unprinted.” Since 2014, the Saul Leiter Foundation has been preserving and promoting his archive, continuing a work of enhancement that has found new chapters with the exhibitions The Unseen Saul Le iter and Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, organized to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023.
The exhibition Saul Leiter. A Window Dotted with Raindrops is on view from November 15, 2025 to January 18, 2026 at the San Gaetano Cultural Center in Padua. The exhibition is open Tuesday through Sunday and holidays from 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; closed Mondays.
Tickets: full 16 euros, reduced 14 euros, reduced children 7 to 12 years old 6 euros. Until Nov. 14, there is a presale promotion with an open ticket for 12 euros (instead of 20), including a 100x140 cm poster and two free side events.
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