Saul Leiter: Centennial

To look hard at Saul Leiter’s Canopy (1958), a striking image of afternoon snowfall in New York City, is to confront a whole lot of darkness. Not the metaphorical sort: most of Leiter’s image is, in fact, black as night, lost to the negative space of an awning which obscures his scene. Though a barren tree peeks through a break in the fabric, this is only a momentary relief. Above that interstice’s apex, darkness abounds.

Then there’s Leiter’s Red Umbrella (ca. 1955), whose subject is blocked by the blurry contours of a taxicab door. And there’s Pull (ca. 1960), which is shot through foggy winter glass, its visibility further compromised by a large sticker on the door we look through. And Soames Bantry, Harper’s Bazaar (October 1960), which fits a contoured face (that of Leiter’s lifelong partner) onto a small mirror’s glass, while a bored man in a top hat steals the rest of the scene. And, finally, another of Leiter’s commissions for Harper’s Bazaar, this one from September 1961, in which a model stands between stairwells and awnings, her head partially obscured, yet again, by the dark outline of a canopy.

These photographs are part of Centennial, the most recent showing of Leiter’s work at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Leiter, who died ten years ago, would have been one hundred last December: Centennial marks the occasion by assembling a mixture of old favorites and lesser-seen portraits. Leiter’s work has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, and it’s startling to remember that such prominent shows are the exception, not the rule; Leiter spent much of his career in relative anonymity. Today, both his work and style seem to be everywhere, and a generation of younger photographers draw from—and reinvent—his distinctive method.

Centennial highlights a key trait in Leiter’s work: the viewer is forever conjoined to the experience of watching. Composed against reflections and shadows, through windows and thresholds, Leiter’s images never presume to show reality itself, but rather reflect a moment as witnessed. They always preserve the obstructions and artifacts which make up the messy business of seeing.

It was one of Leiter’s seminal insights that no subject is ever too precious to obscure. The world comes first, and if the tree is in the way, the tree stays in the way. This is a relatively uncommon quality among photographers, who, Leiter told the filmmaker Tomas Leach, usually prefer to “control what they see.” They curate their scenes, clamping foliage to C-stands, stowing away trash bins, and filtering out lights. Leiter was the opposite, hiding his subjects behind cafe tables, parked cars, and flung-open doors. His photographs were the result of “wandering around … the French have a name for it, I think—flaneur, or something like that.”

The folksiness of that quotation might ring a little false; Leiter lived the role of the flaneur to a tee. Such urban observers, wrote Baudelaire, strive “to see the world … and yet to be unseen of the world.” Their greatest joy is “dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.” Usually this pleasure is personal, the flaneur’s alone—distinctive to Leiter’s work is the notion that this experience might be shared. By leaving all the errata of a given vantage in place, Leiter proffers the pleasure of seeing. Canopy, for example, renders the viewer acutely conscious of her own viewpoint. This style both effects a heightened realism and permits the participatory experience of each scene.

An acquaintance, recalled Leiter, assessed his legacy in the late eighties. “You used to be a big thing,” the man said bluntly, “now you’re nothing.” It’s hard to imagine this appraisal today, with Leiter’s work winning crowds in France and Japan this past year, and Uniqlo even selling out a line of Leiter T-shirts. More importantly, Leiter’s impressionistic, overheard style has also traced into the work of many younger photographers. Some of the best among them—like Sarah van Rij, Taras Bychko, Éléonore Simon, and Jeremy Perez-Cruz—carry on Leiter’s finest trait: their viewers are invited to watch alongside them, witnessing the world in tandem with their shutter.

It’s not hard to guess why this style is back in vogue. There’s a real humility in showing more than just the subject, a cognizance that the scene takes place within something larger, that the photographer is only one witness among many. There’s also a political valence, one in line with the shifting aesthetic mores of our times. Leiter’s work feels congruent with the unease, rightfully felt by many, with muscular, totalizing artistic claims, the wariness of any gaze which dictates what might be seen, and why it might matter. Privileging the contingent and suspicious of truth claims, Leiter was a little less certain and a little more speculative. He looked lots, but declared little. There wasn’t much arrogance in the work or the man. Not long before his death, Leach asked him whether he was a pioneer. “I don’t know,” Leiter laughed, “I don’t care.”