Saul Leiter is considered one of the pioneers of color photography. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and, following the path of his father (renowned teacher of the Talmud) studied to become a Rabbi. It is difficult to know if it was the camera that his mother gave him when he was 12 years old, his early interest in painting or both, which led him, at the age of 23 years, to make the decision to leave theology school and move to New York to become an artist. There, Saul Leiter was fortunate enough to meet the painter of the Abstract Expressionist School, Richard Pousette-Dart and the photographer W. Eugene Smith, who encouraged him to continue on the path of photography, although he never abandoned painting until the day of his death in 2013 when he was 89 years old.
In his early years in New York, Leiter took photographs in black and white, and in 1948 he began taking color photographs, when the world was still seen and photographed in black and white. Its typical photographic language is that of abstraction: it compresses spatial dynamics, obstructs lines of vision and renounces a centered perspective. Leiter's pictorial sensibility is clearly visible in the soft and desaturated contrasts he applied to his works.
Leiter's first black and white photographs capture the street life of New York in the late 40s and 50s. In this exhibition you can see 130 color and black and white photographs, around 30 street photographs, and a similar number of nudes and intimate portraits.
Leiter also stood out as a fashion photographer and, for 20 years, his work was published by graphic media as important as Show, Elle, Queen, British Vogue, and Nova. Although as he said: "A window covered by raindrops interests me more than the photograph of a famous person".
This exhibition has been organized with the Saul Leiter Foundation of New York and curated by Roger Szmulewicz (owner of the Gallery FIFTY ONE in Antwerp).
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