I have had many recurring dreams since he passed, and not all of them good. 'Early one morning, around the time I was writing this text, I had a dream about Saul. As we leave the year 2022 behind us (maybe more readily than we would have liked) and move with great optimism into 2023, we find inspiration in this anecdote from Saul Leiter Foundation director Margit Erb's essay. PRAISE AND REVIEWSįROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE Happy New Year… and many happy returns! Featured image is reproduced from The Unseen Saul Leiter-a labor of love that we are very proud to have published, drawn from the astonishing, overwhelming and previously unarchived, unpublished slide archive of the Saul Leiter Foundation. The publication of his first collection, Early Color, by Steidl in 2006, inspired an avid “rediscovery” that led to worldwide exhibitions and the release of a documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2014).

He pioneered a painterly approach to color photography in the 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s. Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. It is edited by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, and is embellished with texts that describe how Leiter assembled his slide archive and how it is being catalogued and restored. This volume contains works discovered through this project-specifically, color photography from slides never before published or seen by the public. His studio in the East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which has commenced a full-scale survey of his more than 80,000 works.

Choosing to shoot in color when black and white was the norm, Leiter portrayed midcentury New York’s street life with a gorgeous painterliness that evoked the sensuality of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries Rothko and Newman.

Now firmly established as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was relatively little known until the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color, when he was already in his eighties.

A thrilling trove of newly discovered color works from the photographer celebrated for his pioneering painterly vision

Saul leiter photography