A new book of 76 images we haven’t seen before begins to uncover the treasures hidden away in the Saul Leiter archive, says Damien Demolder, and reveals a whole lot about the great man’s life
Most of us think of Saul Leiter as a street photographer. We probably know him for his stylish documentary of the atmosphere that existed in parts of the New York of the fifties and sixties. He did though spend much of his working life as a professional photographer working for fashion magazines such as Elle, Vogue, Queen, Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, and his street work was something of a hobby he pursued in his spare time. His fashion work has for the most part disappeared into the mists of time, while his personal passion project propelled him – late in life, it has to be said – to the attention of the world. To date we’ve been able to see only a fraction of the street images he recorded but the Saul Leiter Foundation, headed by wife and husband team Margit Erb and Michael Parillo, has been sorting through the 60,000 images he left behind so the rest of the world can get to see what it has been missing.
This book, The Unseen Saul Leiter, is the fruit of five years of work focusing on the thousands of boxes of slides they found in Saul’s apartment and in another apartment he rented just to store his pictures. In the book’s introduction Margit says the 76 new images in the book come from a selection they made of 10,000 of the slides in the archive. The foundation has painstakingly catalogued what they have uncovered, and recorded in detail what they can work out about each frame – film type used, date of the picture, the subject, and where it was taken. Some slides are over 70 years old and have been shifted around the city with Saul as he moved from one neighbourhood to another. Saul had sorted some of his collection – of a fashion – and had labelled some he’d intended to come back to; others have been taken from their original mounts and put into mounts that give no indication of which film was used. While most of his prints are labelled with information few of his slides, we are told, hold many clues. So it’s been quite a task putting this book together.
Background into focus
I was expecting to see a collection of Saul Leiter pictures in this book that I hadn’t seen before – and that is what I got. What we also get though is quite a lot more background on Saul and his way of working, from a couple who knew him very well. Margit, founding director of the Saul Leiter Foundation and one of the authors of this book, met Saul in 1996 when he came to the gallery in which she worked to show a
