Saul Leiter, Pull, c.1960
The Brooklyn Rail
To look hard at Saul Leiter’s Canopy (1958), a striking image of afternoon snowfall in New York City, is to confront a whole lot of darkness. Not the metaphorical sort: most of Leiter’s image is, in fact, black as night, lost to the negative space of an awning which obscures his scene. Though a barren tree peeks through a break in the fabric, this is only a momentary relief. Above that interstice’s apex, darkness abounds.
Then there’s Leiter’s Red Umbrella (ca. 1955), whose subject is blocked by the blurry contours of a taxicab door. And there’s Pull (ca. 1960), which is shot through foggy winter glass, its visibility further compromised by a large sticker on the door we look through. And Soames Bantry, Harper’s Bazaar (October 1960), which fits a contoured face (that of Leiter’s lifelong partner) onto a small mirror’s glass, while a bored man in a top hat steals the rest of the scene. And, finally, another of Leiter’s commissions for Harper’s Bazaar, this one from September 1961, in which a model stands between stairwells and awnings, her head partially obscured, yet again, by the dark outline of a canopy.