Carte Postale
Saul Leiter
23/11/2024
01/02/2025
Gallery FIFTY ONE
Gallery FIFTY ONE is honored to announce its upcoming exhibition, “Saul Leiter – Carte Postale,” featuring a rare collection of intimate, postcard-sized photographs by the acclaimed American artist, Saul Leiter. This exhibition includes also a selection of very rare color photographs that enrich the dialogue with this exceptional archive.
This exhibition will open on Saturday November 23rd and will showcase Leiter’s unique perspective on life, capturing beauty in the seemingly mundane through his painterly approach to photography.
These works were recently uncovered by the Saul Leiter Foundation and offer an unprecedented view into his early artistic vision. Originally printed on postcard-sized paper by Saul Leiter, these small yet profound images reveal Leiter’s nuanced portrayal of daily life, from the bustling streets of New York City to the intimate interiors where he sought refuge. Through this collection, visitors are invited to witness Leiter’s skill in transforming ordinary moments into poetic expressions, finding grace in everyday life.
Saul Leiter began his career as a painter, a sensibility he carried into his photography throughout his life. His images are not merely snapshots; each photograph is carefully composed, capturing delicate interplay between light and shadow, which reveals the quiet beauty of urban life. Leiter’s ability to uncover the poetic essence of ordinary moments makes his work deeply relatable, resonating on a universal, human level.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Gallery FIFTY ONE is proud to publish its fourth book featuring Saul Leiter’s works, a tribute to his lasting legacy. This new book will include the images from the recently uncovered collection, alongside a unique addition: two detachable, postcard-sized prints, ready to be shared or displayed as cherished keepsakes.
11 x 8 cm - Photographer’s credit stamp on print verso
Saul Leiter
Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for forty years afterwards they remained virtually unknown to the art world. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter and through his friendship with the abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became — like an extension of his arm and mind — an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis.
The semi-mythical notion of the ‘New York street photographer’ was born at the same time, in the late-1940s. But Leiter’s sensibility — comparable to the European intimism of Bonnard, a painter he greatly admires — placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternative way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.
biography
Born in Pittsburgh, US in 1923
Died in New York City, US in 2013
None of Leiter’s contemporaries, with the single and partial exception of Helen Levitt, assembled a comparable body of work in color. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color: to the rapid recording of the spontaneous unfolding of life on the street, Leiter adds an unconventional sense of form and a brilliantly improvisational, and frequently almost abstract, use of found colors and tones. Leiter’s visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity and contingency is evoked in Saul Leiter: Early Color by one hundred subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the twentieth-century. (source: steidl)
“I happen to believe in the beauty of simple things. I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.” - Saul Leiter
Current exhibitions
-
Carte Postale
Saul Leiter
23/11/2024
01/02/2025
-
La Petite Boutique
at FIFTY ONE TOO
30/11/2024
01/02/2025
