Saul Leiter

Celebrating the centennial of Saul Leiter's birth, this official retrospective honors a revolutionary figure in twentieth-century photography. Saul Leiter photographed and painted nearly every day for over sixty years, amassing an enormous archive, most of which remained unseen during his lifetime. Finding inspiration within a few blocks of his flat in Lower Manhattan, he was a master at discovering beauty in the most ordinary places. Celebrated today for his evocative color photographs of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, which were unknown in their day, Leiter also found success as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. All the while, he was shooting black-and-white street scenes on his daily walks, as well as nudes and intimate portraits back home, while continuing his painting explorations with abstract watercolors, whimsical sketchbooks, and painted photographs. Created in collaboration with the Saul Leiter Foundation, this definitive monograph brings together these diverse yet interconnected bodies of work—including much that was previously unpublished—to reveal the complete artist for the first time.