Forever Saul Leiter

PREMIERA: 27 STYCZNIA 2022

Saul Leiter's work was rediscovered when the photographer was in his late eighties, beginning two decades of critical re-evaluation. Leiter’s painterly images evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour, at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. His mastery of colour is displayed in unconventional cityscapes in which reflections, transparency, complex framing and mirroring effects are married to a very personal printing style, creating a unique kind of urban view; his complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.

Leiter's studio in New York's East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now home to the Saul Leiter Foundation. The Foundation is undertaking a full-scale survey and organization of Leiter's more than 80,000 works, with the aim of compiling the ‘complete’ archive. In so doing they have uncovered many previously unpublished photographs and documents, shedding new light on the secrets of Saul Leiter's artistic process.

As Saul Leiter said, ‘Photographs are often treated as capturing important moments, but they are really small fragments and memories of the world that never ends.