“He was not the man to put on a suit and walk up to an art director with his portfolio.”Įrb represented Leiter for the next eighteen years, becoming a close friend and working with him on “Saul Leiter: Early Color,” the release of which, in 2006, cemented his position as a pioneer of color photography. “I think on some level he cared, but he didn’t want to care in a conventional manner,” she said. Erb, who began representing him in 1995, when she started work at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, says that this apparent lack of interest in the art world may have masked a certain resentment for authority. Wider recognition didn’t come until 1992, when Jane Livingston, the chief curator for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed Avedon’s recommendation to include Leiter in a book called “The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963.” Howard Greenberg, the influential gallerist, began representing Leiter shortly after the book’s publication, but public recognition never seemed to drive Leiter. He wasn’t a careerist, but he knew that he was good.” During the sixties, Leiter’s sophisticated fashion photography, along with that of Richard Avedon and Hiro, filled the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. His photography was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, and he was offered an invitation, which he declined, to take part in Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition in 1955. Among the items Erb and Goldfarb have unearthed is a catalogue from a 1947 exhibition of American Surrealism at the Art Institute of Chicago that included a painting by Leiter, who was then twenty-four. Leiter, who was born in 1923, started taking pictures in adolescence, but despite showing early promise as a photographer and painter he mostly remained obscure. Primitive trinkets and vintage toys, including a Mickey Mouse doll, sit on the mantle canvases of folk and Japanese art lean against the walls.

Figurative paintings by Soames Bantry, Leiter’s partner, hang alongside his own abstract watercolors. Old saucers that he used as palettes are stacked on the window ledge above a quiet courtyard. A high-backed wooden chair, where he painted and drank coffee, sits in a corner of a large room lit by a wall of windows. The apartment today is far more organized than it was when Leiter died, but evidence of his life is everywhere.

Photographer saul leiter