It is this private, personal photography that is leading to a reappraisal of Leiter’s work. There’s an irony here, for, while he would never have known it when he first moved in, Saint Mark’s Place gradually became Little Tokyo – one of the largest communities of Japanese people living anywhere beyond the homeland. He lived there for the entirety of his life in New York, and the vast majority of the many thousands of photographs he took of the city were taken within two blocks of his home.

Leiter’s apartment was near Saint Mark’s Place. It sparked a withdrawal from public life, and for much of the rest of his days, he lived and worked in a reclusive, solitary fashion. He fell into debt, and had to sell-off the studio he had always used on Fifth Avenue. In the early 1980s, Leiter found it more and more difficult to find work. Indeed, the photography industry was not always kind to him. But he was never renowned or celebrated as a great visual artist in the way Arbus or Frank are. He worked for fashion magazines – most notably Vogue and Elle – and gained photojournalistic commissions throughout much of his life. Until his death at the age of 90, on November 26, 2013, Leiter was not well known beyond industry circles. (Image credit: © Saul Leiter Foundation, Howard Greenberg Gallery) Names like Hokusai, Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Hon’ami Kōetsu, with their use of calligraphy, block statements of colour, and ma – a Japanese spatial concept of negative space, ‘the nothingness where, infact, everything happens’, as the Japanese historian Kōtarō Iizawa terms it. He became immersed in the ornate minimalism of Japanese art, particularly the revolutionary ukiyo-e printmakers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Leiter’s early paintings are awash with colour, in the lineage of expressionists like Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and impressionists like Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Leiter was fascinated by abstract art, and, at the age of 23, to the horror of his devout family, he dropped out of theology school, got the bus to New York, found a home in the Manhattan’s East Village and enrolled in art school. Leiter dutifully did so, spending his early twenties immersed in the teachings of the Talmud at a theology school in Cleveland.īut an interest in another kind of deity kept pulling at him. His family expected him to follow his father – to attend theology school and become a Rabbi. Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, the son of a renowned Jewish theological scholar.

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