Margit Erb – författare

The first sightings of newly discovered work from Saul Leiter’s abundant archive of colour slides. Now widely acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923–2013) remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s, and his work has been drastically re-evaluated over the last two decades. Leiter’s images evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. His complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment. Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh and moved to New York City in 1946. He pioneered a painterly approach to colour photography starting in the late 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s. The publication in 2006 of his first monograph, Early Color, inspired an avid ‘rediscovery’ of Leiter’s work by contemporary audiences. His studio in New York’s East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation. The Foundation has begun a full-scale survey and organization of his more than 80,000 works, with the aim of compiling the ‘complete’ archive. This volume contains works discovered through this process, specifically colour slides, never before published or seen by the public. Meticulously curated by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation and supported by texts that explain how Leiter built the slide archive and how it is now being explored, catalogued and restored, this new monograph will be a must-have for photography fans worldwide.

Saul Leiter has only in recent years been acknowledged as one of the great pioneers of colour photography. Like Robert Frank of Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction. This long-awaited new edition of the book, first published to mark the major retrospective of Leiter's work at Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2012, features, in addition to his early black and white and colour images, his fashion photography, the overpainted nudes, as well as his paintings and sketchbooks.

Celebrating the centennial of Saul Leiter’s birth, the official retrospective of a revolutionary figure in twentieth-century photography. Saul Leiter photographed and painted nearly every day for over sixty years, amassing an enormous archive, most of which remained unseen during his lifetime. Finding inspiration within a few blocks of his apartment in Lower Manhattan, he was a master at discovering beauty in the most ordinary places. Celebrated today for his evocative colour photographs of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, which were unknown in their day, Leiter also found success as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. All the while he was shooting black-and-white street scenes on his daily walks, and nudes and intimate portraits back home, while continuing his painting explorations with abstract watercolours, whimsical sketchbooks and painted photographs. Created in collaboration with the Saul Leiter Foundation, this definitive monograph brings together these diverse yet interconnected bodies of work – including much that was previously unpublished – to reveal the complete artist for the first time.