Rain muffles edges, blurs lines, deactivates the habitual geometry of things. It produces a different topography of the visible, in which the solidity of forms surrenders to a softer logic, more available to error and variation. Volumes become thinner, surfaces bend, light diffuses unexpectedly, turning glass and puddles into optical instruments. The real is redrawn. And it is precisely in this silent rewriting that Saul Leiter’s eye is grafted as a body immersed in an environment that calls it to a new form of attention.
To really understand his poetics, the one that arises from this atmospheric listening that transforms the everyday into apparition, one need only look at a film shot in the spring of 2013. Leiter is in his East Village studio, sitting by the large window that accompanied him for decades. With him is Margit Erb, friend and gallery owner, handling the camera. Around them are messy stacks of photographic prints, coffee mugs, stained and forgotten watercolors. Leiter picks up a painting, observes it, smiles. “The problem with my paintings is this: I don’t make them all at once,” he says. Then he adds, “Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I edit them. Sometimes I rework them. Just because I started a painting doesn’t mean I finished it.” He laughs again, recounting that De Kooning liked one of his works because some toilet paper had stuck to it while drying, and he decided to leave it there. Not out of provocation, but out of inclination. Because what Leiter was after, in the end, was the imprecision, the almost nothing. And just as he could safely leave a painting unfinished, so too in photographs he let the image hover between presence and disappearance.
When Saul Leiter arrived in New York he was in his early twenties and even less certain. For a few nights he slept in Central Park, homeless and with only the idea in his pocket that art, perhaps, could save him. Soon he found an apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village and clung to the few affections he had left. He occasionally saw an aunt in Brooklyn and entertained himself with a few phone calls to his mother, who continued to worry about him as only mothers can. “She was always worrying about me,” he recounted. “She worried about keeping me afloat. And she kept me afloat for a long time.” It was during those years that she met Richard Pousette-Dart, one of the youngest of the Abstract Expressionists, and it was during that same period that Saul began to shoot black-and-white portraits, with a silent attention that started from within the image. An attention that even then seemed to look beyond the surface. Pousette-Dart became one of his first subjects, but also his first sponsor: he showed the young man’s work to gallery owner Betty Parsons, who offered to exhibit it.
The boy, intimidated, declined. He didn’t have the money to frame the paintings. But perhaps more than that, he hadn’t found the courage to really believe it. “It could have been a good thing,” he said later. “I could have become part of the first abstract expressionist movement.”
There was no anger in the recollection, but a quiet acceptance of those who, at some point, chose to remain on the fringes. Leiter always seemed not to seek clamor: he projected his photographs on the apartment wall. That was all it took, a small audience of friends, a few rickety chairs, and the red light breaking on the wall like a prayer.
Meanwhile, he continued to paint. Only his earliest works were oil, as he preferred water with its indecision and the way color expands without control. Magazines began to take notice of him and his photographs over the next decade: Life published two series that today remain among his most intense black-and-white efforts, Wedding as a Funeral and Shoes of the Shoeshine Man. They were exercises in understated everyday irony, where every detail is charged with a melancholy double-bottom. In Wedding as a Funeral, the paradox is all in the look. It is a celebration that, crossed through Leiter’s lens, is transformed into a wake. Life Magazine reported that the photographer spent much of his days looking for incongruity, convinced that flawless beauty could, with the right visual cut, reveal a disconcerting deformity; and that the obvious, if caught in the exact moment, could restore the thrill of the absurd. That gray day on Fifth Avenue, he saw a crowd gathered outside a church, and, attracted by the watchful fixity of those standing outside and the almost funereal composure of those coming out, he lifted his Laica and snapped. The images that arose looked like a tale of mourning, but it was, indeed, a wedding. All this because Leiter was not interested in recording the truth of the event, for his gaze was already elsewhere, within that slight interference between appearing and seeming, between the gesture that celebrates and the gesture that holds back grief. His photographs insinuate, interrogate and frame the world always when it seems about to give way, to collapse. And there is never judgment, only a deep sense of the transience of things, a sad lightness that never descends into mockery. Indeed, in the very paradoxical title, it reveals a sharp acumen: there is no celebration that does not already contain its end, no union that does not carry within itself the germ of separation.
In Saul Leiter’s world, painting was never an alternative to photography, but rather the original breath, the primal gesture with which he tried to touch time. He began painting at a very young age, around 1938, and never stopped until a few weeks before his death, which occurred on November 26, 2013. He spent years and years of daily, persistent, silent practice that preceded and spanned his entire photographic parable. Leiter painted to stay alive, to keep loneliness at bay, to translate an intuition into matter, to feel that there is still a possibility of embodying what does not yet have form. In his archive today lie more than four thousand works, mostly watercolors, but also gouaches, inks and paintings on photographs, with a freedom that mixes techniques, media, intentions. Color, in his work, has nothing decorative or illustrative about it. It does not serve to distinguish or highlight, but becomes a structural element of the image, its climate, its voice.
His reds are dense, shot through with a visual matter that makes them porous, layered, almost wounded. They are pigments that do not accompany the content, but make it possible. He looked at color as an autonomous form of thought, and even his references (Bonnard, Morandi, Rothko) were never photographic, but deeply connected to that painting which treated light as substance, as an event within the image.
And so, too, his photographs do not seem to seek the moment when something happens, but the moment when everything stops, expands, disposes itself to be seen without imposing itself. In his production, frontality is an exception. Subjects show themselves only partially, they traverse space, they always remain just outside the image in wrong, lopsided, out-of-focus areas: a face behind glass, a figure cut by a shadow, a woman whose back is turned as the light discolors the edges of her coat. The composition develops precisely by absence of center, by displacement of attention. Leiter constructed images that stand on the precarious balance of details, on the emptiness that holds forms together, on the transparency that confuses inside and outside, public and private, waiting and passing. In this continuous suspension.
In those same years when New York celebrated the monumental gestures of abstract expressionism with gigantic canvases, the rhetoric of the ego and the physical confrontation with the surface, Leiter remained faithful to the minute scale, the intimate act. Franz Kline, for example, had told him, “If you only worked big, you’d be one of the guys.” But he didn’t want to be one of the boys. He didn’t want to become big; he wanted to stay real. His photographs, like his paintings, were little domestic jazz, scoreless improvisations, sketches of a thought that became gesture, of an emotion that surfaced without fanfare.
In the 1970s, as his career in fashion was winding down, Saul Leiter spent entire days in an East Village darkroom, printing almost obsessively thousands of black-and-white negatives: women he had loved, rooms shot through with tired light, fragments of a life he had preferred not to exhibit. He created a book In My Room that never saw the light of day while he was alive, as if for decades Leiter had guarded those intimate portraits, deeply affectionate and never smug or illustrative, in the same way that one guards a secret too fragile for the world to see. In those images, often taken through an ajar door, a mirror, a domestic distance that never becomes voyeurism, there is her whole gaze: painterly, respectful, melancholy. His women sleep, laugh, undress or read, and they are not muses, nor erotic ghosts, but real presences, stubborn in their irreducible reality. Some photographs such as those in the 1958 Lanesville series (the only core of color nudes) already foreshadow his future work for Harper’s Bazaar, but they do not participate in the glossy aesthetic of desire. Rather, they are the sweetest attempt to retain something that time, mercilessly, kept taking away.
After his death, the dusty drawers of his studio revealed what Leiter had been silent about for a lifetime: an endless archive of small snippets (as he called them) cut out, crumpled up, tucked between the pages of books, as if the work was never meant for a museum wall, but for the far more cruel and everyday act of remembering. Some were hand-painted nudes, with the same palette as his watercolors; others were print specimens with the triangular edges still visible, never finished, never arranged as Jay’s 1957 photograph shows. In each, the same meticulous attention to the unrepeatable detail, the face that shifts just a little, the light that falls only there, in that exact, perfect spot. No caption or willingness to explain ever appears, and he himself, when asked about the identity of the women portrayed, would respond with a question, “Can you keep a secret?” and immediately afterwards, without waiting for a reply, would smile, “Me too.” In those rediscovered images there is everything that escapes the chronicle of photography and the rhetoric of revelation: there is a man who looks, and in looking he does not steal, he does not undress, he does not pose. There is a man who crossed the century with a sideways step, staying in a room while the world ran elsewhere, and entrusted small presences with the most authentic part of his gaze.
An extremely powerful image, for example, is that of Jay in the bathtub, datable to around 1958: the body submerged in water, the cloth covering the pubis, the head tilted, the gaze drooping toward herself. It is a chaste and raw portrait at once, where desire is held in balance between modesty and abandonment. Where the milky transparency of the water and the close but never intrusive photographic cut tell of a vulnerability traversed by beauty. Or again, in the double work depicting her sitting with a cigarette between her fingers, the comparison between the 1963 photograph and the pictorial reworking of the 1990s shows how much for the artist memory was never fixed forever, but in constant metamorphosis. The color layers and the paper becomes skin holding time and simultaneously letting it escape. Jay appears absorbed, alive, and in the painted version almost transfigured, immersed in a world of watery hues and elusive forms. She is still there, but she is also elsewhere, and the body becomes an echo, while the pose a remnant that surfaces and dissolves.
And then there is Dottie, the woman who, according to the account of those who worked alongside Leiter, “knew how to be innocent in one moment and terribly seductive the next.” The photographs exhibited in Monza, all undated, tell of a time stretching out in a cut afternoon of light. Reflections draw geometries on her face, arms, neck. The body breaks down into fragments, as if Leiter’s gaze moves around her without ever invading her. The window seems closed, the room is quiet, desire becomes light. It is a dance of shadow and light, where form is caressed without ever being defined.
Finally, Inez. One of the most intense images (photographed in about 1947 and painted almost forty years later) shows her lying on an unmade bed with her legs bent unevenly and her arms stretched over the edge of the mattress, as if in physical surrender, exhausted and very sweet. Her head is reclined backward, almost falling off the bed, her mouth half-open and her gaze not staring at the lens but grazing it, passing by it. Her naked breasts, propelled by the twist, are exposed with a naturalness that does not seek effect: it is not a posed body, but a body that simply and fragilely stands in time. Around, the room is alive with crumpled sheets, a book with its cover folded, the box open on the floor. Nothing is hidden, nothing is emphasized. It is the real, allowed to happen.
But it is in the painting, made years later, that everything changes. Leiter intervenes with gouache and watercolor, transfiguring flesh into color. Anatomical boundaries are lost in a vibration of purples, greens, oranges, and the body becomes painting, and painting, memory. These images, seen together, tell of something beyond photography, beyond intimacy, beyond even love. They tell of a stubborn fidelity to what flows against the wind: a minute, sensual, imperfect time. A time that does not adjust, that does not accelerate, that does not show itself to be necessarily seen. The image, in Saul Leiter, is never shout or affirmation: it is whispering that is embodied, a body that holds a caress even when the skin is gone. It is a form of carnal resistance to the frenzy of the world. Her shots are like visual haikus, built on very few elements looked at from the side that condense into fragile, restrained emotion. It is in this minimal, suspended grammar that the image of Maria, one of her most lyrical and complex photographs, takes shape: a woman absorbed in front of a glass, trapped between posters, reflections and shadows that overlap like planes of consciousness. Nothing is clear, everything is visible. Her figure, sorrowful and absorbed, does not impose itself, but faintly emerges. It is there, yet elsewhere and seems to belong more to memory than to reality.
This is Leiter’s poetics: the art of looking without invading, of composing without exhibiting, and of giving back the world not as it appears, but as it feels when one looks at it from within. In his photographs (as well as in his painted nudes, torn specimens, domestic details accumulated like a private language) there is only one thing that really matters, and that is the possibility of inhabiting the gap, of remaining. Of observing what passes through and over us, remaining still within the instant that holds us back.
Rain muffles the edges, blurs the lines, deactivates the habitual geometry of things. It produces a different topography of the visible, in which the solidity of forms surrenders to a softer logic, more available to error and variation. Volumes become thinner, surfaces bend, light diffuses unexpectedly, turning glass and puddles into optical instruments. The real is redrawn. And it is precisely in this silent rewriting that Saul Leiter’s eye is grafted as a body immersed in an environment that calls it to a new form of attention.
To truly understand his poetics, the one that arises from this atmospheric listening that transforms the everyday into apparition, one need only look at a film shot in the spring of 2013. Leiter is in his East Village studio, sitting by the large window that accompanied him for decades. With him is Margit Erb, friend and gallery owner, handling the camera. Around them are messy stacks of photographic prints, coffee mugs, stained and forgotten watercolors. Leiter picks up a painting, observes it, smiles. “The problem with my paintings is this: I don’t make them all at once,” he says. Then he adds, “Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I edit them. Sometimes I rework them. Just because I started a painting doesn’t mean I finished it.” He laughs again, recounting that De Kooning liked one of his works because some toilet paper had stuck to it while drying, and he decided to leave it there. Not out of provocation, but out of inclination. Because what Leiter was after, in the end, was the imprecision, the almost nothing. And just as he could safely leave a painting unfinished, so too in photographs he let the image hover between presence and disappearance.
When Saul Leiter arrived in New York he was in his early twenties and even less certain. For a few nights he slept in Central Park, homeless and with only the idea in his pocket that art, perhaps, could save him. Soon he found an apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village and clung to the few affections he had left. He occasionally saw an aunt in Brooklyn and entertained himself with a few phone calls to his mother, who continued to worry about him as only mothers can. “She was always worrying about me,” he recounted. “She worried about keeping me afloat. And she kept me afloat for a long time.” It was during those years that she met Richard Pousette-Dart, one of the youngest of the Abstract Expressionists, and it was during that same period that Saul began to shoot black-and-white portraits, with a silent attention that started from within the image. An attention that even then seemed to look beyond the surface. Pousette-Dart became one of his first subjects, but also his first sponsor: he showed the young man’s work to gallery owner Betty Parsons, who offered to exhibit it.
The boy, intimidated, declined. He did not have the money to frame the paintings. But perhaps more than that, he had not found the courage to really believe in it. “It could have been a good thing,” he said later. “I could have become part of the first abstract expressionist movement.”
There was no anger in the recollection, but a quiet acceptance of those who, at some point, chose to remain on the fringes. Leiter always seemed not to seek clamor: he projected his photographs on the apartment wall. That was all it took, a small audience of friends, a few rickety chairs, and the red light breaking on the wall like a prayer.
Meanwhile, he continued to paint. Only his early work was oil, as he preferred water with its indecision and the way color expands without control. Magazines began to take notice of him and his photographs over the next decade: Life published two series that today remain among his most intense black-and-white efforts, Wedding as a Funeral and Shoes of the Shoeshine Man. They were exercises in understated everyday irony, where every detail is charged with a melancholy double-bottom. In Wedding as a Funeral, the paradox is all in the look. It is a celebration that, crossed through Leiter’s lens, is transformed into a wake. Life Magazine reported that the photographer spent much of his days looking for incongruity, convinced that flawless beauty could, with the right visual cut, reveal a disconcerting deformity; and that the obvious, if caught in the exact moment, could restore the thrill of the absurd. That gray day on Fifth Avenue, he saw a crowd gathered outside a church, and, attracted by the watchful fixity of those standing outside and the almost funereal composure of those coming out, he lifted his Laica and snapped. The images that arose looked like a tale of mourning, but it was, indeed, a wedding. All this because Leiter was not interested in recording the truth of the event, for his gaze was already elsewhere, within that slight interference between appearing and seeming, between the gesture that celebrates and the gesture that holds back grief. His photographs insinuate, interrogate and frame the world always when it seems about to give way, to collapse. And there is never judgment, only a deep sense of the transience of things, a sad lightness that never descends into mockery. Indeed, in the very paradoxical title, it reveals a sharp acumen: there is no celebration that does not already contain its end, no union that does not carry within itself the germ of separation.
In Saul Leiter’s world, painting was never an alternative to photography, but rather the original breath, the primal gesture with which he tried to touch time. He began painting at a very young age, around 1938, and never stopped until a few weeks before his death, which occurred on November 26, 2013. He spent years and years of daily, persistent, silent practice that preceded and spanned his entire photographic parable. Leiter painted to stay alive, to keep loneliness at bay, to translate an intuition into matter, to feel that there is still a possibility of embodying what does not yet have form. In his archive today lie more than four thousand works, mostly watercolors, but also gouaches, inks and paintings on photographs, with a freedom that mixes techniques, media, intentions. Color, in his work, has nothing decorative or illustrative about it. It does not serve to distinguish or highlight, but becomes a structural element of the image, its climate, its voice.
His reds are dense, shot through with a visual matter that makes them porous, layered, almost wounded. They are pigments that do not accompany the content, but make it possible. He looked at color as an autonomous form of thought, and even his references (Bonnard, Morandi, Rothko) were never photographic, but deeply connected to that painting which treated light as substance, as an event within the image.
And so, too, his photographs do not seem to seek the moment when something happens, but the moment when everything stops, expands, disposes itself to be seen without imposing itself. In his production, frontality is an exception. Subjects show themselves only partially, they traverse space, they always remain just outside the image in wrong, lopsided, out-of-focus areas: a face behind glass, a figure cut by a shadow, a woman whose back is turned as the light discolors the edges of her coat. The composition develops precisely by absence of center, by displacement of attention. Leiter constructed images that stand on the precarious balance of details, on the emptiness that holds forms together, on the transparency that confuses inside and outside, public and private, waiting and passing. In this continuous suspension.
In those same years when New York celebrated the monumental gestures of abstract expressionism with gigantic canvases, the rhetoric of the ego and the physical confrontation with the surface, Leiter remained faithful to the minute scale, the intimate act. Franz Kline, for example, had told him, “If you only worked big, you’d be one of the guys.” But he didn’t want to be one of the boys. He didn’t want to become big; he wanted to stay real. His photographs, like his paintings, were little domestic jazz, scoreless improvisations, sketches of a thought that became gesture, of an emotion that surfaced without fanfare.
In the 1970s, as his career in fashion was winding down, Saul Leiter spent entire days in an East Village darkroom, printing almost obsessively thousands of black-and-white negatives: women he had loved, rooms shot through with tired light, fragments of a life he had preferred not to exhibit. He created a book In My Room that never saw the light of day while he was alive, as if for decades Leiter had guarded those intimate portraits, deeply affectionate and never smug or illustrative, in the same way that one guards a secret too fragile for the world to see. In those images, often taken through an ajar door, a mirror, a domestic distance that never becomes voyeurism, there is her whole gaze: painterly, respectful, melancholy. His women sleep, laugh, undress or read, and they are not muses, nor erotic ghosts, but real presences, stubborn in their irreducible reality. Some photographs such as those in the 1958 Lanesville series (the only core of color nudes) already foreshadow his future work for Harper’s Bazaar, but they do not participate in the glossy aesthetic of desire. Rather, they are the sweetest attempt to retain something that time, mercilessly, kept taking away.
After his death, the dusty drawers of his studio revealed what Leiter had been silent about all his life: an endless archive of small snippets (as he called them) cut out, crumpled up, tucked between the pages of books, as if the work was never meant for a museum wall, but for the far more cruel and everyday act of remembering. Some were hand-painted nudes, with the same palette as his watercolors; others were print specimens with the triangular edges still visible, never finished, never arranged as Jay’s 1957 photograph shows. In each, the same meticulous attention to the unrepeatable detail, the face that shifts just a little, the light that falls only there, in that exact, perfect spot. No caption or willingness to explain ever appears, and he himself, when asked about the identity of the women portrayed, would respond with a question, “Can you keep a secret?” and immediately afterwards, without waiting for a reply, would smile, “Me too.” In those rediscovered images there is everything that escapes the chronicle of photography and the rhetoric of revelation: there is a man who looks, and in looking he does not steal, he does not undress, he does not pose. There is a man who crossed the century with a sideways step, staying in a room while the world ran elsewhere, and entrusted small presences with the most authentic part of his gaze.
An extremely powerful image, for example, is that of Jay in the bathtub, datable to around 1958: the body submerged in water, the cloth covering the pubis, the head tilted, the gaze drooping toward herself. It is a chaste and raw portrait at once, where desire is held in balance between modesty and abandonment. Where the milky transparency of the water and the close but never intrusive photographic cut tell of a vulnerability traversed by beauty. Or again, in the double work depicting her sitting with a cigarette between her fingers, the comparison between the 1963 photograph and the pictorial reworking of the 1990s shows how much for the artist memory was never fixed forever, but in constant metamorphosis. The color layers and the paper becomes skin holding time and simultaneously letting it escape. Jay appears absorbed, alive, and in the painted version almost transfigured, immersed in a world of watery hues and elusive forms. She is still there, but she is also elsewhere, and the body becomes an echo, while the pose a remnant that surfaces and dissolves.
And then there is Dottie, the woman who, according to the account of those who worked alongside Leiter, “knew how to be innocent in one moment and terribly seductive the next.” The photographs exhibited in Monza, all undated, tell of a time stretching out in a cut afternoon of light. Reflections draw geometries on her face, arms, neck. The body breaks down into fragments, as if Leiter’s gaze moves around her without ever invading her. The window seems closed, the room is quiet, desire becomes light. It is a dance of shadow and light, where form is caressed without ever being defined.
Finally, Inez. One of the most intense images (photographed in about 1947 and painted nearly forty years later) shows her lying on an unmade bed with her legs bent unevenly and her arms stretched over the edge of the mattress, as if in physical surrender, exhausted and very sweet. Her head is reclined backward, almost falling off the bed, her mouth half-open and her gaze not staring at the lens but grazing it, passing by it. Her naked breasts, propelled by the twist, are exposed with a naturalness that does not seek effect: it is not a posed body, but a body that simply and fragilely stands in time. Around, the room is alive with crumpled sheets, a book with its cover folded, the box open on the floor. Nothing is hidden, nothing is emphasized. It is the real, allowed to happen.
But it is in the painting, made years later, that everything changes. Leiter intervenes with gouache and watercolor, transfiguring flesh into color. Anatomical boundaries are lost in a vibration of purples, greens, oranges, and the body becomes painting, and painting, memory. These images, seen together, tell of something beyond photography, beyond intimacy, beyond even love. They tell of a stubborn fidelity to what flows against the wind: a minute, sensual, imperfect time. A time that does not adjust, that does not accelerate, that does not show itself to be necessarily seen. The image, in Saul Leiter, is never shout or affirmation: it is whispering that is embodied, a body that holds a caress even when the skin is gone. It is a form of carnal resistance to the frenzy of the world. Her shots are like visual haikus, built on very few elements looked at from the side that condense into fragile, restrained emotion. It is in this minimal, suspended grammar that the image of Maria, one of her most lyrical and complex photographs, takes shape: a woman absorbed in front of a glass, trapped between posters, reflections and shadows that overlap like planes of consciousness. Nothing is clear, everything is visible. Her figure, sorrowful and absorbed, does not impose itself, but faintly emerges. It is there, yet elsewhere and seems to belong more to memory than to reality.
This is Leiter’s poetics: the art of looking without invading, of composing without exhibiting, and of giving back the world not as it appears, but as it feels when one looks at it from within. In his photographs (as well as in his painted nudes, torn specimens, domestic details accumulated like a private language) there is only one thing that really matters, and that is the possibility of inhabiting the gap, of remaining. Of observing what passes through and over us, remaining still within the instant that holds us back.
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