Customer Reviews

EARLY COLOR

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This monograph was suggested by a friend of mine who is a very talented designer and photographer -- he thought it would be a good touchstone for my work. The book is a smallish format (8 x 8 inches) with color plates, one per page of about 100 images. It was published in conjunction with a show at New York's Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Leiter was best known as a painter who exhibited alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning in the 1950's, but his real talent may have been as a photographer. Focusing on urban street scenes in New York, Leiter creates a highly layered visual sensibility -- not a translation of abstract expresionism to photography, but a style uniquely his own that defines the photographic medium in a new way. Many of the images look forward to the digital montage styles that are gaining currency today, but with a lyrical beauty and rhythm that speak to the humanity and drama of the street. It is unfortunate it took the world 40 years to appreciate this visual genius and rediscover what he saw.

A must have photobook.

Long overdue, this give this long over-looked artist a place to shine. The color reproductions are marvelous and have a woderfule bygone era quality about them.

100 lyrical and improvisational photographs, informed by the representational idiom of painting, exhibiting a muted, evocative and unique color palette from early and obscure film stocks and emulsions, mostly from the 1950s.

I was surprised at how small this book was when it arrived (of course, had I checked the Product Details I would have seen that it's about eight inches square) but now having looked through the pages several times I can see why Steidl published it this size. Photographers like Crewdson, Gursky or Shore require a large page because their work is saturated with detail. Here, these wonderful photos are a sliver of city life and presenting them about postcard size is perfect.

Leiter gives us an intimate look at the everyday in what seems to me an almost unique vision. Fred Herzog's color work during the fifties and early sixties in Vancouver does seem slightly similar especially the vibrant reds that appear in both their work (Fred Herzog: Photographs). Leiter's photos though, capture the small fragments of color and shape on the street which he cleverly takes further by using reflection, shadow and soft focus to make an image that could be considered a sort of photo/painting.

I liked the way he uses commercial street signage (as does Herzog) to provide small areas of bright color amongst the dark hues and shadows so prevalent in any city. I doubt any of the photos were taken in bright sunlight and even a few that include snow still have a dark hue to them.

The book has a hundred photos printed with a 175 screen on a matt art, one to page, except for two spreads and opposite each photo there is the briefest of caption: location and date. The first edition came out in 2006, second in 2007 and this one to coincide with an Amsterdam exhibition of Leiter's photos. The publication of this edition should bring the high prices of earlier copies down to a more realistic level. All three editions seem identical except for some type changes on the imprint page.

This is one of those books whose size works in harmony with the contents and really helps to bring Leiter's intimate city photos to life.

***LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

Our photography club ([...]) begins it's meetings with an educational series of photographers; one "legacy" and one "contemporary". Saul Leiter was a legacy shooter featured a few months ago so I picked up this book. Not a disappointment at all. I look through this book a few pages at a time before bed and I've looked through it two or three times now. These images are in one sense voyeuristic in that Leiter uses window reflections & other distortions to capture these images rather than point the camera directly at his subject. One reviewer notices that this gives a layered look to his images and he's right. This is a great book for opening a photographer's eye to new compositional possibilities and a possible expansion of style. Highly recommended.

A very interesting selection of early colour photography. Not quite as impressive as I had expected from the build-up and other references I had seen before buying.