Thursday, April 21, 2016

Color of Postwar New York

Walking, 1956, Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery (most of the Leiter images used here are from the same source)
Photographer Saul Leiter (1923-2013) spent a large portion of his life living in New York City. Working in the tradition of the street photographer, he captured images from Manhattan, applying an artistic eye to a city that was in constant motion. The city, represented through light, composition, movement, shadow, and most of all color, was transformed through his lens. His work is, in many ways, a visual companion to E.B. White's Here is New York. Leiter started shooting color in 1948, a moment when the American cultural landscape was shifting, its contours shaped by the world war and shaded by the new Atomic Age.