Photographs are often treated as important moments but really they are fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.
Saul Leiter
I spent a good part of the afternoon today visiting the Saul Leiter exhibition in Milton Keynes. Leiter has always been one of my favourite photographers I just love his almost abstract photographs that ooze atmosphere and yet portray a calmness within the hustling city of New York where he lived and photographed for fifty years.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that he was one of the most important photographers of the post-war period and a true pioneer and advocate of colour photography, when black and white was considered the default photographic format.
The exhibition states that Leiter photographed every day for sixty years, observing life on the streets of the East Village neighbourhood. When he died in 2013 he left behind a remarkable collection of 15,000 black and white prints, 40,000 colour slides, black and white negatives and over 4000 paintings. It is amazing to think that at one time his work was lost to obscurity, but has since been rediscovered and evaluated for its role in the development and popularity of colour photography.
This brilliant exhibition at The Milton Keynes Gallery (try and get to see it) features 171 fantastic colour and black-and-white photographs alongside a selection of over 40 of Leiter’s lesser-known paintings.
A Sensored-View 