Saul Leiter
The photographer Saul Leiter left an indelible mark on the medium of photography
through his pioneering approach and unique artistic vision.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, Leiter relocated to New York City in 1946,
where he would spend decades capturing
the essence of urban life through his lens.
Leiter sought to capture candid moments on the streets of New York City
mainly
within a few blocks of his Manhattan apartment.
Many of his contemporaries in photography documented the grit
and grime of life in the city a hallmark of the
so-called New York School of photography, a mid-twentieth-century movement
with
which Leiter has sometimes been associated.
Leiter’s interest, however, was in finding beauty in the mundane.
His street photographs feature scenes from everyday life people
walking on rain-soaked pavement, bustling crowds, and,most notably,
fleeting moments of solitude, in which his subjects seem removed
from the urban bustle despite being surrounded by it.
Leiter homed in on these seemingly nondescript and trivial moments,
bringing out their intimacy, beauty, and depth.
This is not to say human subjects dominated his work urban infrastructure
and elements such as buildings, furniture, curtains,
and fire hydrants are prominent in his photographs.
In particular, Leiter used objects like mirrors, curtains,
and windows to frame the human subjects in his candid street scenes.
Often, he would intentionally obscure the view using the framing elements themselves
or taking advantage of atmospheric elements like shadows, rain, snow,
or condensation to give the scene both depth and ambiguity,
like a puzzle or an abstract painting.
Additionally, Leiter liked to purchase cheap, expired film stock,
which made his images seem worn and muted, helping to characterize his
abstract style.
Leiter is known for his use of color, an element he wielded masterfully
but sparingly, in careful, vivid bursts.
One well-known photograph,
for example, reveals the all-white expanse of a snow-covered street punctuated
by a single red umbrella.
While Leiter never gave up shooting in black and white,
he began experimenting with color in the late 1940s,
a time when black and white dominated the medium.
Art photographers considered color to be a vulgar element suitable
only for advertising and popular magazines.
Photography was still striving for acceptance as a serious art form,
and color was considered a barrier to achieving this status.
It was not until the 1970s that color photography was embraced
by the mainstream art world through the work of other early pioneers
such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore.
While Leiter had started breaking from the conventions of black
and white at least two decades earlier,
his work was hidden from the public throughout most of his career;
his name was therefore absent from the headlines
that heralded the emergence of color in fine-art photography.
In fact, it was not until the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter:
Early Color, a photobook compilation of his works,
that Leiter gained recognition as a groundbreaking figure in this regard.
Leiter himself, however, reveled in his obscurity, which was largely self imposed.
He shunned fame and prestige, rejecting offers to have his work publicly exhibited.
He shared his color images only with friends and others close to him,
projecting them on a wall in his apartment rather than incur the high costs of printing.
To earn a living, Leiter worked as a photographer for fashion magazines,
including Harper’s Bazaar, where his images exhibited many of the stylistic
elements
that characterized his personal work;
for example, he often shot his fashion-model subjects partially obscured
or framed by glass panels, layering the images to add a sense of depth
and mystery.
Leiter was a prolific painter throughout his life,
and his street photographs exhibited a painterly aesthetic for example,
in their methodical use of color.
Yet starting in the 1970s, Leiter took a step further
by painting over some of his own photographs,
most of which were intimate portraits of friends taken in his apartment.
He was fascinated by the ensuing variation of surfaces and textures;
the paint would adopt different qualities
depending on the smoothness or roughness of the printed photograph’s surface.
Photograph prints, unlike standard acrylic canvases,
were prone to wrinkling or tearing over time,
and Leiter intended these effects to be incorporated into the works.
He would also continually add layers of paint sometimes decades
after he had begun a piece resulting in art that was as tactile as it was visual.
In recent years, there has been heightened interest in Leiter’s work,
with exhibitions and retrospectives showcasing
his contributions to the art world.
His unique aesthetic continues to inspire not only photographers
but also filmmakers and other artists,
who draw upon his innovative style to inform their own work.
Though his much-deserved fame arrived late in life,
it was his anonymity that allowed him to move through the streets undisturbed
as a silent observer of beauty. |
英語検定 １級(2024年第3回No.4)