사울 레이터(Saul Leiter), 미국, 사진가, 1923-2013
20세기를 대표하는 사진작가로 추앙받는 로버트 프랭크, 다이앤 아버스, 윌리엄 클라인 등에 비해 사울 레이터는 그리 잘 알려진 인물이 아니었다. 2013년 11월, 90세를 일기로 작고한 레이터는 독신 생활을 단출하게 유지하며 생의 대부분을 사진에 헌신했지만, 생전에 그의 작품이 대중적으로 널리 소개된 바는 거의 없었다. 그는 80세가 훌쩍 넘은 2000년대 중반에야 재발견되기 시작했고, 사망한 후 비로소 진지하게 연구되고 있는 작가다.
오늘날 사울 레이터를 수식하는 가장 보편적인 표현은 ‘컬러 사진의 선구자’ 혹은 ‘거리 사진의 대가’ 같은 말이다. 1950년대 뉴욕의 일상 풍경을 회화적인 방식으로 담아낸 그의 사진들은 케이트 블란쳇이 주연하고 토드 헤인즈가 연출한 영화 <캐롤>에 지대한 시각적 영향을 미치기도 했다.
1923년 피츠버그의 한 유대인 가정에서 태어난 사울 레이터는 23세가 되던 해에 신학교를 자퇴한 후 화가의 꿈을 안고 무작정 뉴욕행 버스를 탔다. 인상주의와 표현주의, 그리고 당시를 휩쓸던 일본식 미니멀리즘에 크게 영향을 받은 레이터는 그림에도 꽤 재능을 보였다. 그러나 주변의 예술가 친구들을 감탄케 했던 것은 그가 라이카 카메라를 들고나가 즉흥적으로 찍어온 맨해튼 거리의 풍경 사진이었다.
<라이프>지는 경력이 채 일 년도 되지 않은 이 무명 신인의 사진을 여러 페이지에 걸쳐 게재했고, 에드워드 스타이컨은 <언제나 젊은 이방인들(Always the Young Strangers)>이라는 기획으로 그의 작품들을 뉴욕현대미술관(MoMA)에 걸기도 했다. 잭슨 폴록을 세계적인 스타로 만든 베티 파슨스 갤러리 역시 초청의 서신을 보냈지만, 세속적 성공에 무관심했던 레이터는 수십 년이 지난 후에야 책 사이에서 그 편지를 발견했다고 한다.
About Him
The American artist Saul Leiter, the son of a rabbi and distinguished Talmudic scholar, was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. Leiter’s interest in painting began in his late teens. In 1946, when he was 22, he left the theological college he was attending in Cleveland and moved to New York City to pursue painting. Shortly after his arrival he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. Leiter’s friendship with Pousette-Dart, and soon after with W. Eugene Smith, along with the photography exhibitions he saw in New York (particularly Henri Cartier-Bresson’s at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947), inspired him.
By 1948 Leiter had begun to experiment in color, sometimes using Kodachrome 35 mm film past its sell-by date. His main subjects were street scenes and his small circle of friends. Leiter made an enormous and unique contribution to photography with a highly prolific period in New York City in the 1950s. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. His earliest photographs in black-and-white and color show an extraordinary affinity for the medium.
“I happen to believe in the beauty of simple things. I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.”
Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black-and-white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Steichen also included 20 of Leiter’s color photographs in his slide talk “Experimental Photography in Color” at MoMA in 1957. 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 Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.
In the early 1980s Leiter was faced with financial difficulties that forced the closure of his Fifth Avenue studio. For the next two decades he lived and worked virtually unknown. In 2006, with the help of the art historian Martin Harrison and Howard Greenberg Gallery, the groundbreaking monograph Saul Leiter: Early Color was published by Gerhard Steidl in Germany. What Leiter called his “little book” became an overnight sensation with worldwide distribution and firmly established the artist as an early pioneer in the history of color photography.
In 2006 the Milwaukee Museum of Art held the first U.S. museum show of Leiter’s photographs. In 2008 Leiter traveled to Paris for his first European exhibition, at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Also in 2008, Leiter had his first painting exhibition in 30 years, at Knoedler Gallery in New York. The artist was the subject of Tomas Leach’s highly acclaimed 2013 documentary, Saul Leiter: In No Great Hurry, which continues to be shown at film festivals throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
“We live in a world full of expectations, and if you have the courage, you ignore the expectations. And you can look forward to trouble.”
Leiter has been prominently featured in solo museum and gallery shows in the U.S. and Europe. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Yale University Art Gallery; and other prestigious public and private collections.
Saul Leiter passed away at his home in New York City’s East Village on November 26, 2013, leaving behind an immense archive of his life’s work in art. In the New York Times obituary on Leiter, Margalit Fox writes, “Of the tens of thousands of images he shot—many now esteemed as among the finest examples of street photography in the world—most remain unprinted.”
In 2014 the two-volume book set Saul Leiter: Early Black and White was published by Steidl. Saul Leiter: Retrospective, an exhibition organized by the Deichtorhallen Museum in Hamburg, continues to travel to major European museums; its latest stop was at the Kunstfoyer in Munich in 2019. Meanwhile, the show Photographer Saul Leiter: A Retrospective, which opened in 2017 at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo, traveled in Japan to Itami (2018) and Niigata (2019), with Seigensha’s accompanying monograph, All About Saul Leiter, in its seventeenth printing and available in four international editions.
In 2018 a little-seen body of the artist’s work came to light: black-and-white nudes, mostly taken in the late 1940s through the early 1960s. These photographs, very much equal collaborations between Leiter and the women in his life, are presented in the books In My Room from Steidl and Women from the Japanese publisher Space Shower, and have been shown in exhibitions at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin.
“I believe that there is something in you that strives for order, and within that order there’s a certain kind of mishmoshy confusion, and you bring this mishmoshy confusion, if you succeed, into some kind of order. There’s an element of control, and there’s also an element that just happens—if you’re very lucky. Artists need luck.”
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