Saul Leiter
[KUNST HAUS WIEN mourns Saul Leiter, who died in New York on 26 November 2013.]
The exhibition presents the wide range of this versatile artist’s works, including early black-and-white and colour photographs, fashion images, painted photographs of nudes, paintings and a number of his sketchbooks. One section of the exhibition is devoted to Saul Leiter’s most recent photographs, which he continues to take on the streets of New York’s East Village.
It is only in the last few years that Saul Leiter has received due
recognition for his role as one of the pioneers of colour photography.
As early as 1946, and thus well before the representatives of the
so-called “new colour” photography in the 1970s, such as William
Eggleston and Stephen Shore, he was one of the first to use colour
photography for artistic shots, despite its being frowned upon by other
artists of the day. “The older aesthetic views on the hegemony of
black-and-white photography and the historical dating of the first
artistic use of colour photography to the early 1970s need to be
critically reviewed. Saul Leiter’s oeuvre essentially rewrites the
history of photography,” comments curator Ingo Taubhorn.
In Leiter’s works, the genres of street photography, portraiture, still
life, fashion photography and architectural photography coalesce. He
finds his motifs, such as shop windows, passers-by, cars, signs and –
time and again – umbrellas, in the direct vicinity of his apartment in
New York, where he has now lived for almost 60 years. The
indeterminateness of detail, the blurring of movement and reduced depth
of field, the use of shadows or deliberate avoidance of the necessary
light, as well as the alienation caused by photographing through windows
or as reflections, all combine to create the muted colour vocabulary of
a semi-real, semi-abstract urban space. These are the works of an as
yet almost undiscovered modern master of colour photography.
Saul Leiter has always considered himself both a painter and a photographer. In his painting and in his photographs he clearly tends towards abstraction and two-dimensionality. One often finds large deep-black areas, produced by shadows, taking up as much as three quarters of his photographs. Passers-by are not presented as individuals, but as blurred clouds of colour, filtered through misty panes of glass or wedged in between walls of buildings and traffic signs. The boundaries between the abstract and the representational in his paintings and photographs are virtually fluid. Saul Leiter’s street photography – a genre in which his work is matchless – is, in essence, painting metamorphosed into photography.
Curators:
Ingo Taubhorn (Haus der Photographie / Deichtorhallen Hamburg) and Brigitte Woischnik
An exhibition by Haus der Photographie / Deichtorhallen Hamburg
in cooperation with KUNST HAUS WIEN.