When Saul Leiter began shooting Kodachrome slides in New York in the late 1940s, color was scorned by most serious photographers, who thought of it as a hobby for vacationing dads or the commercial domain of magazines and advertising agencies.
But Leiter, who died in 2013, was a lifelong painter as well as a photographer. As displayed in “Saul Leiter: Centennial,” an exhibition of photographs and paintings at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan, closing on Feb. 10, and a new monograph, “Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective,” he took advantage of everyday filters — a window smeared by raindrops or humidity, the flurries of snowflakes, reflections in glass — to fragment reality into compositions that recalled paintings by the Abstractionists who lived near his place on East 10th Street.
Although his pioneering color pictures are what he is best known for today, Leiter employed similar strategies in his masterly black-and-white photography. He might devote two-thirds or more of the frame to a monochromatic block, inviting you to look as closely at the shadowed street in the (black-and-white) “Walking” (c. 1955) or the eponymous black fabric in the (color) “Canopy, New York” (1958), as you would at the subtle gradations of tone in a painting by Robert Ryman or Ad Reinhardt.
