Saul Leiter The Centennial Retrospective

Margit Erb, Michael Parillo, Michael Greenberg, Adam Harrison Levy, Lou Stoppard, Asa Hiramatsu

Celebrating the centennial of Saul Leiter’s birth, the official retrospective of 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 apartment 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, and 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definitive monograph brings together these diverse yet interconnected bodies of work—including much that was previously unpublished—to reveal the complete artist for the first time.

Reviews

Leiter came to know and capture the restive ebb and flow of New York's streets better than almost anyone. And though Leiter was certainly a New York photographer, his work is defined by its formal excellence just as much as its storied subject matter. That excellence is on full display in Margit Erb and Michael Parillo's Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, an abundant survey of Leiter's street, fashion, and experimental photography, as well as his intimate portraiture.

— The New Criterion

Contributors

Margit Erb

Author

Margit Erb is the founder and director of the Saul Leiter Foundation.

Michael Parillo

Author

Michael Parillo is the associate director of the Saul Leiter Foundation.

Michael Greenberg

Contributions By

Adam Harrison Levy

Contributions By

Lou Stoppard

Contributions By

Asa Hiramatsu

Contributions By