Saul Leiter

Lanesville

07/05/2019

29/06/2019

FIFTY ONE TOO

Opening reception and book launch: Saturday, May 4th 2019 from 2 – 6 pm

Gallery FIFTY ONE is proud to present its sixth solo exhibition on Saul Leiter (USA, 1923-2013), focusing on his studies of the female figure in both photography and painting. In addition to his colourful, poetic street photographs that by now belong to the collective art memory, the nude photographs Leiter took in his apartment on East 10th Street in New York City’s East Village reveal an intimate insight into his personal habitat.

Read the full press release here

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.