Saul Leiter In Colour And Before – Photographs from A Centenary Special

 

Photographer Saul Leiter (1923 –  2013) is remembered in Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, a monograph from Thames and Hudson. The books features many of Leiter’s most gorgeous pictures, not least of all the street photograph above of a woman sat at a cafe in Paris in 1959

 

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania into a Jewish family. Seemingly destined to become a rabbi, things began to change when Saul’s mother gave him his first camera at age 12. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist.

 

 

Like Bob Hyde in the London who tuned his fine art-trained eye to photography, Leiter moved from the canvas to film, first taking black and white pictures with a 35 mm Leica. In 1948, he started taking color photographs.

 

 

Beginning in the early 1960s, Leiter worked as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen and Nova. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar.