Walk with Soames Saul Leiter 1958
Blog # 13
Look carefull, pause a while. A painting? A photograph? Maybe a screen-print?
It’s hard to know what exactly we are looking at. It has poise, elegance, and a coherent colour scheme. It has lights that demand attention.
But what? A photograph taken by Saul Leiter in 1958. A photographer with a distinct vision.
He wants us to see and not see.
The subject could be deduced, but his vision slows us down as we look. What’s going on is not immediately clear. Is he trying to add a little mystery, ambiguity, fun? The fun of unraveling the riddle, the fun of the puzzle, a game for the curious mind?
Why is he doing this? Trying to out fox us? He was a man who’d liked a game, a cheerful, self effacing man who liked a laugh. But I suspect that there is more than this. Is he is trying to portray the world in a different way, from a different perspective? Is he saying that there is more than surface appearances? Is he looking to create depth in our perception, to go beyond the day to day, beyond the obvious and make us look again ?
Saul Leiter mixed with other photographers of his day, he knew what photography could do and probably, in his whimsical way, wanted to be different.
Yet there is more.
Saul Leiter’s first medium was painting and he moved to New York in 1946 to further his skills and outlooks. He called painting his first love. He maintained a lifelong habit of painting daily and produced thousands of Expressionist works.
Photography is about finding things,
painting is different. It’s about making something
Book Saul Leiter Gouache, casein and watercolour 1957
Painting obviously brought something else to his photographic vision.
Did he wish to make his photographs more like paintings? This was certainly possible as his understanding of what painting could possibly do clearly filtered into the his way of looking and his way of creating. I look at his photographs and I see paintings.
What then did painting bring that so influenced his photography?
Conventional photography of the time, and generally ever since, brings a strong sense of authority and immediacy. An immediacy that is demanding, that is up front, that is in your face. It often solves the puzzle leaving the viewer little slack in his/her imagining. The vision is hard, sharp and unyielding. It neutralises the conversation.
Paintings, at least some paintings, leave more to the imagination, they leave that important wiggle room that allows the viewer to wonder, to penetrate and to solve the pictorial problem. This is certainly the case with Abstract Expressionism.
Saul Leiter was not alone in this desire to conflate the boundary between photography and painting. In the early days of photography many practitioners sought to create photographs with a painterly presence.
The Flatiron Alfred Stieglitz 1903 Photogravure
Why? Maybe they lacked confidence in the new medium, perhaps their perspectives were powerfully moulded by the history of painting, especially as Impressionist painting was so prevalent at this time.
I suspect this debate, painting vis-a-vis photography, has never been fully resolved and continued as photography developed and widened in scope. I’m sure that Saul Leiter felt the lure of this energetic contradiction in the history of photography and wished to make his mark within it.
To put it bluntly. I feel that Saul Leiter wanted to be an artist and felt so much of photography was not artistic, and that creating painterly photographic images was indeed a mark, a definitive vision.
That photography was not artistic is a thought that nowadays seems ridiculous, perhaps even perverse. As photography has become global and is used by everyone with an iPhone or an Instagram account it is now possible to see photography as almost anything you like, from fine art photography, through selfies to criminal mugshots and everything in between.
Painted Nude Saul Leiter 1970-1990
Saul Leiter never let go of this guiding light for his images, later in life he actually combined painting and photography by over painting existing photographic images of nudes. Painting seems to him to have been a vital aspect throughout his work but for me he didn’t need to go down this route of over painting. The combination of photographs and over painting seems curiously thin as a vision. Superficial with little or no, benefit. His unadorned photographs are astonishing on their own.
Saul Leiter Taxi 1957
Perhaps he was not so troubled by the painting/ photographic polemic, perhaps he simply like to walk the streets of New York City and capture its life in his own sublime way.
There are things that are out in the open, and there are things
that are hidden. The real world has more to do with what is hidden
The Saul Leiter Foundation is a great source of information about his life and art. www.saulleiterfoundation.org
Another brilliant set of ideas. Very refreshing.
Very interesting stuff. Art is a communication. Perhaps an over simplistic reduction but it maybe useful. Both paintings and photography may be too obvious to be communicating anything other than the bleeding obvious. And therefore not engage the observer. This engagement is crucial to 20th Century art. If it does not captivate, intrigue, inspire curiosity it’s no longer art. The other aspect that emerges from your blog is the potential dialog between painting and photography. The last photo is obviously derivative of Edward Hoffer. But then cross fertilisation across media is not new. Japanese woodcuts influencing even into the late 20th Century colourist painters, like Milton Avery with their flat colour and symbolism.
What may be new is new technology and the digital image. It’s easy and ubiquitous and so easily cropped. Another way of seeing and may be communicating?
Really interesting and great images. Thanks, Richard xxx
A fascinating essay – I love it and I am grateful to you for exploring the photography / painting issue so clearly – I think I understand it a bit better now! Xxx