Chromogenic Print. Printed 2022.
Image: 34.3 x 22.5 cm / 13 1/2 x 8 7/8 in / Paper: 35.6 x 27.9 cm / 14 x 11 in
Saul Leiter Foundation copyright stamp dated "2022" with signature in pencil by Margit Erb, director, on label and Saul Leiter Foundation edition stamp with print date and edition number in pencil on label affixed to print verso
© The Artist
A taxi is the one place in a city where you're moving and stuck at the same time. That's the joke of this picture, and Saul Leiter is in on it: he's a paying fare in a maroon back seat the colour of a held breath, and instead of getting out to take the photograph like a sensible person, he stays put and shoots through the mess. The dashboard gives it away — No 4143, PASSENGERS, stamped on a little license plate inches from the lens. We're not the driver. We're cargo, looking out at a city we're paying to leave.
What he gets for staying is the woman in red on the far pavement, no bigger than a thumbnail, the only warm upright thing in a street of parked metal. And then the cheap side glass does its trick: it stops being a window and becomes a mirror, so a Coca-Cola sign and a phantom car slide across the pane in the wrong direction, ghosts driving the opposite way. You can't tell, finally, which cars are out there and which are only reflected. That confusion is the whole point. It's exactly the thing you'd miss if you were actually trying to hail this cab instead of riding in it.
Leiter was shooting colour like this on Kodachrome in the early 1950s, decades before the museums decided colour was allowed to be art — work now held by the Saul Leiter Foundation and shown worldwide, a quiet rebuke to everyone who waited. This is a vintage-look chromogenic print from his estate, the reds bleeding exactly as he'd have wanted. He once said he didn't have a philosophy, he had a camera. Looking at the red coat across the street, I almost believe him. But a man without a philosophy doesn't wait in the back of a taxi for the city to rhyme with itself.