Diane Arbus and Saul Leiter, photographing the mystery around the corner

"There are people who sacrifice everything for success," warned Saul Leiter (Pittsburg, 1923- New York, 2013) shortly before his death, in a talk organized with the writer Vince Aletti.

“I never felt like this.

I give more importance to the idea that there may be someone who loves me and whom I can love ”, he added, underlining his usual humility with the use of a conditional.

Hence, he worked in silence for almost six decades, with the leisurely rhythm of one who looks around without expecting anything in return, until in 2006, the publication

(Steild) rediscovered his work while offering a new context for color photography.

Since then, Leiter has come to be recognized as a master photographer and possibly one of the great colorists of the 20th century.

He was 82 years old, and he continued to go out every day with his camera, willing to discover the beauty and mystery of the mundane, each day more aware that in this world “seeing is a careless undertaking”.

Untitled, undated.Nicolas Kraznai/Saul Leiter Foundation

No title, no date.

Paper Framed Slide Box: Unlabeled.Saul Leiter/Saul Leiter Foundation

No title, no date.

Box of Kodak ready-to-mount slides: “Sublimes”. Saul Leiter/Saul Leiter Foundation

No title, no date.

Paper frame slide box: “Sel.

street” Saul Leiter/Saul Leiter Foundation

No title, no date.

Anscochrome box: “Street”. Saul Leiter/Saul Leiter Foundation

No title, no date.

Anscochrome box: “Different streets”. Saul Leiter/Saul Leiter Foundation

No title, no date.

Anscochrome Box: “Mix”. Saul Leiter/Saul Leiter Foundation

Untitled (self-portrait), 1960. Kodachrome slide box: “Saul SP”. Saul Leiter/Saul Leiter Foundation

Untitled, undated.Nicolas Kraznai/Saul Leiter Foundation.

Tattooed man in carnival.MD.

1970. Diane Arbus / © The Estate of Diane Arbus

Woman with hat of roses, NYC 1966Diane Arbus / © The Estate of Diane Arbus

Triplets in their bedroom, NJ 1963.Diane Arbus / © The Estate of Diane Arbus

Four people in a gallery during an opening, NYC 1968.Diane Arbus / © The Estate of Diane Arbus

A very young baby, NYC [Anderson Hays Cooper] 1968.Diane Arbus / © The Estate of Diane Arbus

He died one rainy night in November 2013, in his apartment in the East Village of New York, where he lived since 1952 and in whose surroundings he took most of the photographs that make up his work.

A vast archive organized in an apparently chaotic way, but where everything had its place, made up of prints, slides, negatives and paintings.

Margit Erb and Michael Parillo at the head of the Saul Leiter Foundation have been working tirelessly on it.

They are responsible for a careful and necessary intrusion,

(RM Editorial), an edition of the photographer's work posthumously made up of 76 images from the more than 40,000 color slides that make up the artist's legacy.

The title of the publication could allude to a multiple meaning, not only to the unprecedented condition of the images that compose it, but also to the author's fascination with what goes unnoticed and whose mystery shaped his sensibility.

Thus, a double-page photograph, on the book's endpaper, introduces us to the intimate environment of the Leiter, in his apartment.

Added to the dim light that passes through the blind that covers the window is that that sneaks through the cracks, and that that comes from the slide projector.

There are areas that remain in the dark, while one of the author's photographs of him has been captured on the wall.

A projection that reminds us of the photographer's skill when it comes to fixing his gaze on the unnoticed to reveal it to the world as something luminously beautiful,

a single flash that warns of everything hidden in the photographer's file.

“The real world has much more to do with what is hidden than with what is seen, even though we pretend that it is about the public”, affirmed the artist.

The book's index, conceived as a scale plan of Leiter's apartment, serves as an introduction to a tour set out on a black background on which the author's work is printed.

Photographs that were taken between 1948 and 1966, one of the most fruitful stages of his career, mostly with Kodachrome film.

They capture both the rhythm and the stillness of the moment, and through their soft colors and patinas they speak to us of the eye of a photographer who wanted to be a painter.

Skilled not only in the study of color but also in the mastery of forms.

The slides remained stored in small boxes for decades, and are presented to the reader with the information that each of their containers had written.

They show recurring themes in the author's street photography: taxis, windows,

umbrellas and roads wrapped in an atmosphere that is expressed through the elements of the weather.

The figurative is combined with the abstract through intersecting planes and surfaces, through which Leiter introduces the viewer into scenes in which he adopts the attitude of a silent voyeur, where the human figure, frequently half-revealed, and distant and relegated to a second term, even in a group, it appears solitary and tells us about what it hides;

of the inexplicable, of the enigma that surrounds the ephemeral and fleeting moments of everyday life.

What mattered to Leiter "were the intimate secrets, usually out in the open, ready to be contemplated by the humble and poetic eye of a photographer in his East Village neighborhood," writes Philippe Laumont, who for years was in charge of printing his worked.

The divinity of ordinary things

“I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school.

I have a great respect for certain notions of beauty, although for some it is an old-fashioned idea, "said Leiter.

“Some photographers think that by photographing human misery, they are addressing a serious problem.

I don't think misery is deeper than happiness."

Undoubtedly, in these statements he was referring to the controversial Diane Arbus (New York, 1923-1971), one of the most enigmatic figures of her generation, whose work was misinterpreted in her time and continues to generate controversy decades later. .

They were born the same year, shared Jewish ancestry and friendships, and lived in the same neighborhood.

If Leiter was a photographer focused on the perception of a given moment, the photographer focused on the specific characteristics of the portrait, but curiously, in 1970, Arbus asked her colleague to photograph her.

She did it in the artist's studio, in Westbesth, where months later she committed suicide.

She posed with a severe face in front of a cork where she hung different magazine clippings in which a photo of Eugène Atget appears, and another of Jacques Henri Lartigue, as well as her own impressions, with which she lived until she reached to fully appreciate her worth.

"She hurts a bit to be photographed," she had admitted a short time before.

Tattooed man in carnival.MD.

1970. Diane Arbus / © The Estate of Diane Arbus

The portrait is included in

one of the most rigorous volumes dedicated to the artist to date.

It features an extensive timeline drawn from the photographer's writings and correspondence, as well as 200 images.

The publication has been republished by Aperture on the occasion of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the exhibition that MoMA dedicated to the artist in November 1972, one year after her death.

Although she was admired and respected by the art community of her time, the photographer was then unknown to the general public.

The exhibition was as successful as it was controversial, especially for critics, causing a great impact on the hundreds of visitors who waited in long lines to see a whole gallery of exiles from Eden, outlandish and marginal, nudists,

and disabled characters, as well as children whose innocence seems disrupted.

"People walked through the exhibition as if they were in line for communion," said its organizer, John Szarkowski.

For one part of the critics, the work was "compassionate" and "revealing", for another "sinister" and "terrifying".

Susan Sontag highlighted the predatory nature of the medium, "Arbus reflects a lowered, naive and, above all, reductionist, pessimism," she wrote a year later in her essay

Organized by David Zwiner Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery,

revisits the explosive exhibition, the most-visited solo show in MoMA's history, while presenting

, which brings together a body of criticism, essays, and articles from 1967 to the present, in order to offer a comprehensive view of the criticism that his work has provoked and the misconceptions surrounding a radical work that demolished the precepts of his time and affects how the written word shapes the work of every artist.

For Arbus, beauty lay in the course of life, in the vulnerability of the human being, in "the difference, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life... I see divinity in ordinary things," he wrote at 16 years

'The Unseen Saul Leiter'.

'Diane Arbus Revelations'.

'Diane Arbus: First Coming'.

Diane Arbus Documents.

You can follow BABELIA on

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber