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 man stands at the center — pale suit, dark glasses, soft cap pushed back, a cigarette lifted to the lips and held there — yet this is not, in the end, a portrait. Saul Leiter lets him be a figure rather than a face. The real subject is the plate glass between camera and man: the vertical bands of mullion that segment the frame, the reflections sliding across them, and the deep diagonal wedge of midnight blue that opens in the lower half like a second, unaccountable space. The picture is composed of what obstructs it.
This is consistent with how Leiter understood the medium. A painter first, working the streets near his East Village apartment from the 1950s on, he treated color as a tonal event rather than a description, and the window as a device for slowing the city down. Photography here is less an act of capture than of interference — a surface registering a surface. The midtown sidewalk, the parked cars, the curtain wall behind the man are present but demoted, dissolved into the glass that both shows and screens them.
That is the quiet proposition of the image: that a photograph can be most attentive precisely where it declines to clarify. Long dismissed when color was thought merely commercial, Leiter is now held at the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Saul Leiter Foundation. This chromogenic print, made in 2022 in an edition of twenty, keeps the proposition intact — a man, a held cigarette, and the glass that organizes the whole into stillness.