"Joanna"

gelatin silver print

signed (ink) and numbered (pencil) on verso

Saul Leiter’s interest in art began in his late teens, and in 1946, when he was 23, he left  Cleveland and moved to New York City to pursue painting.  That year he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was also experimenting with photography.  Leiter’s friendship with Pousette-Dart, and soon after with W. Eugene Smith, and the photography exhibitions he saw in New York, particularly that of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, inspired his growing interest in photography.
Leiter’s earliest black and white photographs show an extraordinary affinity for the medium, and by 1948 he began to experiment in color. Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar.  Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.
Leiter has made an enormous and unique contribution to photography.  His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries.  Perhaps this is because Leiter has continued through the years to work as both a photographer and painter. His painterly sensibility reaches its fruition in his painted photographs of nudes on which he has actually applied layers of gouche and watercolor in a whimsical and sensuous way. His masterful use of the two media is apparent in these remarkable pieces.
(Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York)