S. Leiter

Saul Leiter , 1923 - 2013

"I never thought of the urban environment as isolating. I leave these speculations to others. It’s quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. One doesn’t have to be in some faraway dreamland in order to find beauty. I realize that the search for beauty is not highly popular these days. Agony, misery and wretchedness, now these are worth perusing." - Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter’s ground-breaking work in photography and painting is only now receiving the international recognition it deserves. Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, Saul Leiter was the son of a distinguished Talmudic rabbi. Leiter’s interest in art began in his late teens, and in 1946, when he was 23, he left Cleveland and moved to New York City to pursue painting. That year he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was also experimenting with photography. Leiter’s friendship with Pousette-Dart, and soon after with W. Eugene Smith, and the photography exhibitions he saw in New York, particularly that of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, inspired his growing interest in photography.

Leiter’s earliest black and white photographs show an extraordinary affinity for the medium, and by 1948 he began to experiment in colour. Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition 'Always the Young Stranger' at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s colour fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.

Leiter made an enormous and unique contribution to street photography. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions had a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. Perhaps this is because Leiter continued through the years to work as both a photographer and painter. His painterly sensibility reaches its fruition in his painted photographs of nudes on which he has actually applied layers of gouache, casein and watercolour in a whimsical and sensuous way. His masterful use of the two media is apparent in these remarkable pieces.

Martin Harrison, editor and author of Saul Leiter : Early Color, writes, “Leiter’s sensibility…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 alternate 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.” - Max Kozloff

【譯百種筆記】

查資料的時候看到這句話非常喜歡：

Where religion is free, the land flourish; where theology reigns, there is nothing but wretchedness

宗教自由之處，沃土豐饒；神學專斷之地，唯聞悲戚。

講這句話的是生物分類學（我們熟悉的界綱目屬種，此時尚未有門與科）之父林奈。啟蒙時代以來有許多迷人的科學家，林奈也是其中之一，雖然學醫，但大半輩子都傾注在他對植物的狂熱研究上。他有兩位學生隨著庫克船長航行大半個地球，採集了許多植物的樣本，他也是第一位打破宗教箝制，把人類跟猩猩猴子一同擺在生物分類學裡的科學家。（當時很多人應該大受打擊吧）