On Saturday 30th November last year (2013) I was attracted by a photograph that grabbed my interest on the Obituaries page of The Guardian. It was taken through a misted window with the blurred shapes of two figures and a yellow lorry in the street on the other side. Part of the mist had been rubbed away as if to aid vision through the misted glass and this more clearly revealed one of the figures on the other side. It immediately evoked mental images of wet days in steamy cafes with condensation running down the window. It was entitled 'Snow' and was taken by Saul Leiter in 1960. Leiter had recently died at age 89.
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| Image 1 |
The obituary written by Sean O'Hagan, tells us that Leiter was a quiet retiring man who never felt that his work was 'good enough'. He was a pioneer of colour and was working in that medium ten years before the recognized trailblazers of American colour photography: William Egglestone and Stephen Shore. He often used out-of-date Kodachrome film in order to achieve the more faded tones that he preferred. He did work in black and white, though, and Edward Steichen featured his work in the exhibition 'Always the Young Stranger' at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Although he worked in black and white and his work was deemed to be on a par with Richard Avedon, Dianne Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Levitt and Weegee,( though not by him), it is is colour photography of New York that is important. Although he worked as a fashion photographer until the 1980s, his favoured genre was street photography, often in the East Village neighbourhood of New York where he lived. He liked to photograph passersby often through, or reflected in misted or dirty windows, giving an abstract feel to them. One of the reasons Leiter was a gifted photographer was that he never stopped looking at life with a painter's eyes; he actually started out as a painter. His work is featured in Jane Livingston's book, 'The New York School' and in Martin Harrison's 'Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945'. In 1991 his fashion pictures were included in an exhibition at the V&A in London.
I realise that one cannot like all genres of photography or any other art form, but I do not enjoy looking at the ugly and so I empathise with him when he said "I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness." (Sire, 2008)
I particularly like the the above photograph (Image 1) and others that Leiter took in a similar vein. I think they are a different take on street photography and wonder if he was trying to cross the boundary between his photography and his painting. They certainly have a very abstract feel to them and remind me of Intentional Camera Movement images and ultra long exposures that I have been experimenting with. (see images below).
Reference list
Sire, Agnes, 2008) Saul Leiter, Steidl Publishers, Gottingen, Germany.
O'Hagan, S,(2013) Saul Leiter: Photographer with a painter's eye for composition and abstraction. Obituaries. Guardian
Davies, L. (2014) Saul Leiter: The anti-celebrity photographer [online]. Telegraph. Available from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/10607211/Saul-Leiter-The-anti-celebrity-photographer.html
Wikipedia, (2014) Saul Leiter [online] Wikipedia. Available from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Leiter
Images
Image 1. Saul Leiter (1960) Snow [photograph]. [online image]. Available from:
http://atlasphotographic.net/locations/saul-leiter/
Images of my own that remind me of Saul Leiter's misted window abstracts:
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| In this image the camera was moved laterally during a long exposure. |
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| An ultra long exposure, made possible by the use of a 10 stop ND filter, streaks the sky and smooths out the water. |
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