My friend Henry once said that I had a talent for being indifferent to opportunities.
It’s not that I didn’t want to have my work appreciated, but for some reason - maybe it’s because my father disapproved of almost everything I did - in some secret place in my being was a desire to avoid success. “I’ve never been overwhelmed with a desire to become famous. I felt that I had nothing, and was close to going out of my mind.” When I look back I’m amazed that I was so badly prepared. I left home because I was unhappy, and came to New York. My brother once said : “Saul had this crazy idea that people oughta be happy. ‘You must avoid being a dilettante.’ I did love him, I disappointed him. He warned me against becoming a dilettante. He was a linguist, a scholar, he read everything under the sun. Trailer for In No Great Hurry, directed by Tomas Leach Below are some of the insights and recollections we came away with, in the artist’s own inimitable words. TIME sat down for a friendly conversation with the painter and photographer at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. and Europe: a slideshow projection (with original transparencies) at the Milwaukee Art Museum a new book, Early Black and White, to be published this summer by Steidl and a recently completed documentary by Tomas Leach, In No Great Hurry. Seven decades after he made his first photographs, Leiter’s work is finally receiving its due, with several exhibitions planned in the U.S.
And his color photographs predate those of “pioneer” William Eggleston by a quarter of a century. Eugene Smith, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon). Congenitally independent, his work more closely aligns with the aesthetic of painters he reveres (Bonnard, Vuillard, Honami Koestu) than the work of the great photographers he knew and still admires (W. His early black and white photographs, made in the mid-1940s, coincide with the birth of the New York School of street photography, but his serene, often-abstract images felt more pastoral than urban - in quiet contrast to the frenetic and visceral work of his contemporaries, and of the city itself. Saul Leiter is an original - a spirited, self-effacing artist who followed his own vision. 26: In memory of Saul Leiter, who has passed away in New York at the age of 89, LightBox republishes a casual conversation with the photographer and painter, originally published earlier this year.
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