In The Unseen Saul Leiter seventy-six recently discovered images from his immense collection of more than 40,000 color slides are published for the first time.
Carefully curated by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, and accompanied by texts explaining how Leiter built his slide archive and how it is now being researched, cataloged, and restored, this monograph is essential for photography enthusiasts worldwide.
Saul Leiter (1923–2013) is now widely recognized as one of the world’s greatest photographers, but he remained a largely unnoticed force in the art world until curators and critics rediscovered him late in life, when he was in his early eighties.
Saul Leiter, a name that surfaced only late in the labyrinth of modern photography, was a man of the margins. He moved like a whisper through the streets of New York, always attentive to the inconspicuous, the accidental, and the fleeting.
His world was a kaleidoscope of rain puddles, fogged windows, and tucked-away silhouettes, always captured in a warm glow of color as subtle as the city light itself.
Leiter was a pioneer in applying a painterly approach to color photography beginning in the late forties. His images capture the fluid movement and rhythm of life on the streets of mid-century New York in color, while his contemporaries still worked largely in black and white.
Leiter saw like a painter. He began his career with paint on canvas, but his camera truly revealed what color could mean as an extension of feeling.
In color’s vibrations, he saw a way to elevate everyday life into poetry. A street corner, a passing umbrella, a coffee-shop window—with Leiter, everything is infused with a timeless melancholy.
He kept his distance from bombast and spectacle. His world was the quiet theater of the street, a universe visible only to those who look long enough.
Leiter created covers for fashion magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar before largely withdrawing from public attention in the eighties.
Not until 2006, with the publication of his first monograph Early Color, his work was enthusiastically rediscovered by a contemporary audience.
Leiter lived and worked until his death in a studio filled with light and shadow in the East Village. His archive is a treasure trove, a labyrinth of colors and reflections that is being opened piece by piece only now, years after his death. Every image that emerges bears his signature introspection and contemplation of the passing moment.
The man himself always remained in the background. His photographs speak all the more loudly. They remind us that beauty does not have to shout to be noticed; it whispers and often hides just around the corner, in the dance of light and shadow.
His studio in New York’s East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, now houses the Saul Leiter Foundation. The foundation is conducting a large-scale inventory and organization of his more than 80,000 works, with the aim of creating a ‘complete’ archive.
Margit Erb is the founder and director of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving Leiter’s art and legacy. Michael Parillo is deputy director of the Saul Leiter Foundation.
In 2023, Thames & Hudson also published Saul Leiter - The Centennial Retrospective , authored by Margit Erb.
The Unseen Saul Leiter - Margit Erb & Michael Parillo
Pages: 160, with 76 color slides
Price: € 38.21
Publisher: Thames & Hudson · Language: English. This article refers to the English-language hardcover edition (ISBN 9780500545560, published September 22, 2022).
