It is very hard to write about someone you look up to and draw essential wisdom and inspiration from. However, it is also unwise to admire the photographer who aspired to be human & authentic over being technically correct. Such is Saul Leiter, one of those few photographers from New York City who created a vault of street photographs as well as a personal trove of very intimate nude photos over his lifetime.
Saul Leiter has put his desire to photograph something just because he liked to over traditional, technically and politically correct pictures. Although he has worked as a professional fashion photographer for some of the bug international fashion houses, he is remembered today more for his street photography from the heart of New York City.
Saul Leiter has mentioned repeatedly that he prefers to shoot because he “just liked it”, not compelled by the need to beg accolades or make it a pronoun for his talents. And it can be seen in his street photographs that he did for several decades in his New York City hometown. The framing is uncanny, just like you would see it and be able to capture it in the way you see it, not how it could be seen.
Saul Leiter was influenced by the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart
Too often we ruin pictures by removing the instinct and pouring an overdose of perfection. Saul Leiter had nothing to do with perfection but everything to do with the heart. Saul Leiter never deterred himself from remaining the true observer, often obscuring the picture, but simply taking in the essence of the scene.
Obscurity is another trait of Saul Leiter’s street photographs. This is how one would naturally observe the scene on a rainy day. Shooting through mist, fog, ice & snow and often using these to frame the shot & obscure the subject automatically created very natural and moody pictures that one can easily relate to.
Saul Leiter pushed his instincts to such a degree that along with obscurity and broad framing, most of his acclaimed shots often did not have any dominating subject at all. The picture just happened to capture how he felt at the moment. In all fairness, these scenes are so natural that no one can deny having scenes just like these. However, photographers running after commercial markets and artificial perfection would stay away from taking pictures like these. But Saul Leiter did not!
Saul Leiter was destined to become a rabbi before becoming a painter. It is probably this reason why few few of his friends knew or saw the thousands of black & white nude & intimate portraits he made of some of his friends in his New York apartments between 1952 & 1970s.
In the 1970s Leiter planned to make a book of nudes, but the project was never realized in his lifetime. These nudes were later published by Steidl in the book “In My Room”. “In My Room” provides an in-depth study of the nude, through intimate photographs of the women Leiter knew.
Showing deeply personal interior spaces, often illuminated by the lush natural light of the artist’s studio in New York City’s East Village, these black & white images reveal a unique type of collaboration between Leiter and his subjects.
Subsequently, Saul started painting over the nude prints, creating a whole set of painted photographs of the nudes. A detailed commentary is available on the Guardian article on Saul Leiter’s Nude Paintings. Following his love for impressionistic art, Saul Leiter used bold colors on the prints.
As Mona Gainer Salim noted in her New Yorker article on the painted nude photographs “Much like a sketch, it provides an underlying geometry—a landscape of shapes—that guides the strokes of his brush. Its surface alters the paint’s behavior; a matte ground will hungrily absorb layers of paint, while a glossy finish touched with a water-heavy brush forms erratic rivulets. Unlike a stretched canvas, a printed photograph will easily crease or tear—accidents Leiter embraced, permitting these wrinkles and folds to become organic constituents of the image.”
I have been very much influenced by Saul Leiter’s approach to photography, without the pompousness, without a care for accuracy or clarity or even any rare attempt to be perfect or demand attention. I started my journey as a street photographer & soon fell in love with the impressionistic abstract art, and still continue to do that. Some of my fine arts photography projects, like Passage of Time, are loosely based on Saul Leiter’s “In My Room”.
I think when you take pictures for yourself, because you like it, because you don’t wish to do anything else and without a desire of being accepted or the fear of being rejected by others, without the want to one-up anyone but to just be the photographer you wish to be & capture that which your heart beats to, you can only be right & happy with your creation.