Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter (1923-2013) was born in Pittsburgh, the son of an internationally renowned Talmudic scholar. Leiter's interest in art began in his late teens, and though he was encouraged to become a Rabbi like his father, he left theology school and moved to New York to pursue painting at age 23.

In New York, he befriended the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. His friendship with Pousette-Dart and soon after, with W. Eugene Smith, expanded his interest in photography. Leiter's earliest black and white photographs show an extraordinary affinity for the medium. By the 1950s, he began to work in colour as well, compiling an extensive and significant body of work during the medium’s infancy. His distinctively subdued colour often has a painterly quality that stood out among the work of his contemporaries.

Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black-and-white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Steichen also included 20 of Leiter’s colour photographs in his slide talk “Experimental Photography in Colour” at MoMA in 1957. Starting in 1958 the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s colour fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was also published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.

Leiter has been prominently featured in solo museum and gallery shows in the U.S. and Europe. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Yale University Art Gallery; and other prestigious public and private collections.

Leiter passed away at his home in New York City’s East Village in 2013, leaving behind an immense archive of his life’s work in art.