Saul Leiter valuation

Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was born in Pittsburgh, the son of a Talmudic scholar, and was studying to become a rabbi when he left for New York in 1946 to be a painter. Encouraged by the painter Richard Pousette-Dart and the photographer W. Eugene Smith, he took up the camera, and from the late 1940s he photographed the streets around his home in the East Village in colour, at a time when serious photography was black and white: figures half hidden by umbrellas, steamed-up windows, reflections and blocks of red and yellow. Edward Steichen included his black-and-white work in Always the Young Strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, and from the late 1950s he worked in fashion, for Harper's Bazaar among others. He painted all his life. Wider fame came late, with Early Color, published by Steidl in 2006.

Most of his colour work was made as slides, and colour prints made at the time are rare. Most of the colour prints on the market were made later, in his lifetime or after it, as chromogenic or pigment prints, often in numbered editions, so the date of printing, the process and the edition matter as much as the image, and two prints of the same picture can be quite different objects. Vintage black-and-white prints from the 1940s and 1950s are a separate category, and his paintings, and the photographs he painted over, are another. The Saul Leiter Foundation in New York, which holds his archive and has been cataloguing tens of thousands of his colour slides since 2018, is working towards a catalogue raisonné and is the reference.