Nearly 40 years would go by before his extraordinary artistic color photography was rediscovered. Leiter accordingly worked primarily as a fashion photographer, for magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar. Back then color photography was regarded as “low art,” fit only for advertising. Like Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction.Įdward Steichen was one of the first to discover Leiter’s photography, showing it in the 1950s in two important exhibitions at New York’s MoMA. After coming to New York in 1946, he exhibited alongside Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning before beginning in the late 1940s to take black and white photographs.

This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Leiter saw himself for a long time mainly as a painter. Saul Leiter (1923–2013) has only in recent years finally received his due as one of the great pioneers of color photography. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to. If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at.

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Saul leiter photography