The Unseen Saul Leiter

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 researched, cataloged, and restored, this monograph is an essential work for photography enthusiasts worldwide.

Saul Leiter (1923-2013) is widely recognized today as one of the world's greatest photographers, but remained an unnoticed force in the art world for a long time until he was rediscovered by curators and critics late in life, in his early eighties.

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Saul Leiter, a name that emerged late in the labyrinth of modern photography, was a man from the margins. He moved like a whisper through the streets of New York, always with an eye for the inconspicuous, the accidental, the fleeting.

His world was a kaleidoscope of rain puddles, fogged windows, cowering silhouettes, always captured in a warm glow of color as subtle as the city lights themselves.

Leiter was a pioneer in applying a painterly approach to color photography from the late forties. His images capture the fluid movements and rhythm of life on the streets of mid-century New York, in color, while his contemporaries were still largely limited to black and white.

Leiter's gaze was that of a painter. It is not without reason that he started his career with paint on canvas, but it was his camera that really made him discover what color can mean as an extension of feeling.

In the vibration of color he saw the possibility of elevating the everyday into poetry. A street corner, a passing umbrella, the window of a coffee shop..., with Leiter it is all imbued with a timeless kind of melancholy.

He kept away from the bombastic, from the spectacle. His world was the silent theater of the street, a universe that only shows itself to those who look long enough.

Leiter made 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 once again discovered with enthusiasm by a contemporary audience.

Leiter lived and worked in a studio full of light and shadow in the East Village until his death. His archive is a treasure chest, a labyrinth of colors and reflections that is only now, years after his death, being opened piece by piece. Every image that comes to light bears its signature of internalization, of contemplating the passing.

The man himself always remained in the background. His photos speak even louder. They are a reminder that beauty doesn't 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 engaged in a large-scale inventory and organization of his more than 80,000 works, with the aim of compiling a 'complete' archive.

Margit Erb is 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.