The guy is a genius. This looks like it will be good.
Saul Leiter is an original — a spirited, self-effacing artist who followed his own vision. His early black and white photographs, made in the mid-1940s, coincide with the birth of the New York School of street photography, but his serene, often-abstract images felt more pastoral than urban — in quiet contrast to the frenetic and visceral work of his contemporaries, and of the city itself. Congenitally independent, his work more closely aligns with the aesthetic of painters he reveres (Bonnard, Vuillard, Honami Koestu) than the work of the great photographers he knew and still admires (W. Eugene Smith, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon). And his color photographs predate those of “pioneer” William Eggleston by a quarter of a century.
Seven decades after he made his first photographs, Leiter’s work is finally receiving its due, with several exhibitions planned in the U.S. and Europe: a slideshow projection (with original transparencies) at the Milwaukee Art Museum; a new book, Early Black and White, to be published this summer by Steidl; and a recently completed documentary by Tomas Leach, In No Great Hurry. TIME sat down for a friendly conversation with the painter and photographer at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. Below are some of the insights and recollections we came away with, in the artist’s own inimitable words.
Read more:
http://lightbox.time.com/2013/02/19/a-casual-conversation-with-saul-leiter/#ixzz2LT3L6Mi2In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter TRAILER
