“I happen to believe in the beauty of simple things. I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.”-Saul Leiter, WUWM Lake Effect radio show, 2006
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. He began painting and taking photographs in his teens. In 1946 he left the rabbinical college he was attending in Cleveland and moved to New York City. First working in black and white, Leiter began experimenting in color photography by 1948; his main subjects were the street and his small circle of friends.
Leiter’s work in fashion photography began as a way to supplement his income. His first commercial photographs were published in Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar in 1958, under the art director Henry Wolf. After dominating the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1960s, alongside the work of Richard Avedon and Hiro, Leiter continued his commercial career through the 1970s, in publications including Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. Leiter enjoyed shooting his fashion work in the street, and his commercial images share with his street photographs a fondness for spontaneity and abstraction. “One of the things photography has allowed me is to take pleasure in looking,” Leiter said. After several decades of obscurity, Leiter achieved newfound fame upon the publication of his first monograph, 2006’s Early Color, leading to many more books and exhibitions around the world. Saul Leiter died in 2013.