Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter (b. 1923 in Pittsburgh) has only in recent years received his due as one of the great pioneers of color photography. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Leiter saw himself for a long time mainly as a painter.

After coming to New York in 1946, he exhibited alongside abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning before beginning in the late 1940s to take photographs. Like Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction. Edward Steichen was one of the first to discover Leiter's photography, showing it in the 1950s in two important exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Back then color photography was regarded as "low art," fit only for advertising. Leiter accordingly worked primarily as a fashion photographer, for magazines such as Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. Nearly forty years would go by before his extraordinary artistic color photography was rediscovered.

This long-awaited new edition of the book, first published to mark the major retrospective of Leiter's work at Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2012, features, in addition to his early black and white and color images, his fashion photography, the overpainted nudes, as well as his paintings and sketchbooks..

Brigitte Woischnik is owner of the agency Foto Factory in Munich, Germany. She has co-curated important photo exhibitions like ＂Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel＂ for the Museum Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany.

Ingo Taubhorn is photographer and since 2006 curator at the House of Photography at Museum Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany.

Saul Leiter (born 1923 in Pittsburg, PA) is an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as The New York School of photographers.

Vince Aletti (born 1945) is an American music journalist and photography critic. He was the art editor of the Village Voice from 1994 to 2005 and the paper’s photo critic for twenty years. Today he reviews photography exhibitions for The New Yorker’s ＂Goings on About Town＂ section.

Adam Harrison Levy is a writer and freelance documentary film producer and director. For the past 15 years, he has worked on a wide range of historical and arts films, primarily for the BBC. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.