It was the antithesis of an artform, which photography was effortfully striving to be. Technically unreliable and forbiddingly expensive, colour was regarded by serious photographers as a vulgar novelty, the medium of oversaturated advertising hoardings and gaudy magazines.
A portrait of John Cage from three years earlier is even more droll – merely the leather sole of an elegant left shoe tucked under a chair, a scattering of hobnails glinting in the light.Ī disciple of Matisse and Bonnard, and keen to continue his own experiments with paint, Leiter, in the late 1940s, began to do something he would later insist was unremarkable: shoot on the still-new technology of colour film. Leiter takes sly delight in subverting the viewer’s preconceptions, or rerouting them in unexpected directions: a 1952 photograph of Marcel Duchamp is taken through what appears to be the plate glass of a cafe window, the master hunched over a table, offering nothing more than the back of his coal-black greatcoat and the edge of a hatbrim. The earliest pictures were black and white: candid, quietly observed portraits of family, friends and fellow artists, often illuminated by gauzy natural light, with an offbeat compositional sense.
The overwhelming majority of his photographs document a mere handful of blocks. An apartment in the dilapidated Lower East Side became his home and imaginative locus over the next 60-odd years, only rarely did he venture out of the city. He eventually dropped out of rabbinical school, and, at the age of 23, boarded a bus for New York, intending to focus on becoming a painter. But when his mother gave him a Detrola at the age of 12 – “I can’t remember why,” Leiter later shrugged, “I thought I’d like a camera” – a different course was set. Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, he grew up in an stringently Jewish household, and was expected to follow his father, a towering figure in Talmudic scholarship, into what amounted to the family business. One of the numerous puzzles about Leiter is the fact that, until recent years, few people had even heard his name.
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