EXHIBITIONS
Saul Leiter “Beauty in the Overlooked Ordinary”
2024.10.25(Fri) – 2025.1.13(Mon)
There is a tremendous advantage of being unimportant.
― Saul Leiter
Saul Leiter, a photographer who captured small fragments of color and poetic sentiment hidden in the streets of New York City, most of which passed away without being published.Although active as a fashion photographer since the 1950s, he completely disappeared from the limelight in his fifties, and since then he rarely left the vicinity of his home and lived an indifferent life according to his sense of beauty. In 2006, his first book, Early Color, published by Steidel in Germany, brought him back into the limelight as a “pioneer of color photography.Since then, exhibitions and books of his photographs have been held around the world, and even after his death in 2013, his reputation continues to grow, making him a rare artist who remains a “developing photographer” even after his death.
The most important mission of the Saul Leiter Foundation, founded in 2014, was to archive the large number of color positives that had gone unorganized.Thanks to the efforts of Margit Erb, president of the foundation, and her staff, in 2023, the 100th anniversary of Saul Leiter’s birth, approximately 150 selected, previously unpublished color works will be brought to the public eye in the form of photo books and projections, attracting new and significant attention.
Under the supervision of the Saul Leiter Foundation, this exhibition will present 44 newly printed works from color positives discovered after his death for the first time in Japan.This will be a rare opportunity to fully experience the one-of-a-kind world of color created by a writer who once said, “Photographs are often treated as important moments but really they are little fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.”
Saul Leiter
The American artist Saul Leiter, the son of a rabbi and distinguished Talmudic scholar, was born on December 3, 1923, in Pittsburgh. In 1946, he left the theological college he was attending and moved to New York City to pursue painting. Starting in 1958 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 also published in many other fashion magazines. In 1981, Leiter closed his Fifth Avenue studio. In 1993, Leiter received funding from Ilford Paper Company to begin printing color work. In 2006, the groundbreaking monograph Saul Leiter: Early Color was published by Gerhard Steidl in Germany. The first solo exhibition in Europe was held at the Foundation Henri-Cartier Bresson in Paris. The artist was the subject of Tomas Leach’s highly acclaimed 2013 documentary, Saul Leiter: In No Great Hurry. Saul Leiter died at the age of 89 on November 26, in New York.
art cruise gallery by baycrew’s
- Address
- SELECT BY BAYCREW’S, Toranomon Hills Station Tower 3F, 2-6-1, Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 105-5503, JAPAN
- Entrance fee
- Free Entry
- Opening hours
- 11:00-20:00(19:30Last entry)
- Closed
- Open daily until March 16