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
Consider what this print actually is. A chromogenic photograph: an image born in the coupling of dyes within a gelatin emulsion, color summoned chemically out of light. And Saul Leiter (1923–2013), photographing in the early 1950s when color was still dismissed as commercial, vulgar, unserious, has chosen as his subject a surface that behaves exactly as his own emulsion does. The frosted, rain-beaded pane filling this frame is a second photographic membrane held up before the first. Moisture has settled into it as silver once settled into a plate; the world beyond deposits itself there as a smear of warm tone bleeding downward, the snow pooling cold and blue at the base.
The medium's whole desire is condensed in one detail: the clean circular porthole wiped or worn high in the fog, through which a wintry New York block resolves into a single lucid medallion — snow on the rooftops, the red blush of a storefront sign, architecture shrunk to a coin of clarity floating in haze. It is a lens cut by hand into vapor, a reminder that every photograph is a window someone has had to clear. At the right margin a man in a hat and dark coat passes, his face already surrendered to the mist, fixed as a stain rather than a portrait.
What we hold, then, is an object made in 2022 from Leiter's archive, a chromogenic print in an edition of twenty. The hand that wiped that porthole is gone; the chemistry that records the wiping persists, carrying its quiet painterly authority into the present.