… GLIMPSE. It may lose a bit of its poetry in the plural, but a whole lot of glimpses is just what the Anne Marin curated exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery – Saul Leiter: an unfinished world – delivered. Wasn’t just that the photos on display were small, less than a foot either way in most cases – indeed, one of the volunteers suggested using the zoom on my phone rather than peer too hard close up That quote on the right was high up on one of the Gallery walls.
I had a hugely satisfying time following the display through and then wandering back around for a more random second view, and while there weren’t many, as the quote says “important moments” – three of the compositions I’d call ‘important’ that have stayed with me’ are in the block of pictures below – collectively it was an illuminating experience. In one of the explanatory texts, someone (sorry, should have noted) said they were surprised when Leiter told them he was interested in Zen … until he witnessed the man at work, taking photos unobtrusively out on the street. One felt that presence strolling through.
Saul Leiter (1923-2013) took photographs documenting – in, as he said, fragments – the streets of New York in the 1950s & ’60s and beyond. He was retrospectively considered a pioneer of colour photography when his work was widely exposed to the public with the appearance of a first book in 2006, but he’d worked in black and white professionally long before. Fashion, advertising and magazine shoots are featured in the exhibition; fascinating to see in an actual magazine, they follow the same enigmatic approach. Something there was, for him, about raindrops, mirrors, and obscure views. Abandoning commercial work, he saw himself as a flaneur, not looking for anything in particular, just the moment.
He was an artist too and the biggest pictures on display – not the collection of miniatures above, obviously – are some of his abstract paintings, full of a warmth and brightness, and unfashionably not shy of pastel colours; friends suggested he work on a larger scale, that if he did he’d be up there premier league painters, like Rothko. A cheerful Rothko even? I’d like to surmise that in Through boards (right, above) he was even giving a playful nod tto his mate (well, he did knew him). Back with a camera, he worked on a book of nudes, using friends as models, but in the end he chose not to publish, instead giving them to a gouache and watercolour treatment to produce inages of great charm. [Click on the pics to enlarge]
In the last gallery in MK they were showing extracts from Tomas Loach’s In no great hurray: thirteen lessons in life with Saul Leiter, a delightful directed chat than an interview, to feel you’re a part of – his warmth and charm (again those words) drawing you in, there in his slightly chaotic studio; the gentle wit and self-amusement a perfect coda to the exhibition.
There is a trailer for that film at https://www.saulleiterfoundation.org, where you can also find some reproductions of his larger paintings and more photos. You can find more overviews of his photography on Youtube.
Oh yes, I said ‘Glimpse’ was a favourite word. For what it’s worth, here’s one of the first pages I produced for Lillabullero, way back in the day, celebrating a handful of the (big) little blighters (nb. not photos): Glimpses
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