Saul Leiter: Una finestra punteggiata di gocce di pioggia
This is the first major exhibition in Italy dedicated to Saul Leiter, an artist who quietly transformed the language of photography. While others sought to capture the grandeur and speed of modern New York, Leiter chose intimacy, slowness, and mystery. His lens lingered on fleeting gestures, rainy windows, foggy streets, reflections in glass—elements that suggest rather than declare, that reveal beauty not in the monumental but in the barely noticed. His photographs are not declarations but whispers, not documents but fragments—what could be called photographic haikus, balancing abstraction and reality.
As curator Anne Morin explains,
“Leiter enjoyed playing with what he saw. He wasn’t drawn to New York’s overwhelming scale or its towering modernity. Instead, he created visual puzzles—layers of shapes and surfaces that reveal and conceal what lies in between, in the almost invisible margins.”
The exhibition sheds light on his dual identity as painter and photographer, showing how his painterly training shaped his use of color and composition. Each image seems to emerge like a brushstroke, delicately framed, never forced. “I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera,” Leiter said. “My photographs are the smallest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of infinite possibilities.” That modesty is key to understanding his art: nothing is over-asserted, and everything feels glimpsed rather than staged. Despite publishing several photo books and participating in important exhibitions in Europe and the U.S., Leiter kept a large part of his work hidden—much of it unpublished, many negatives untouched during his lifetime. Only in 2018, five years after his death, was a new body of work revealed: black-and-white nudes taken between the late 1940s and early 1960s, the result of intimate collaborations with women close to him. Born in 1923 to a prominent rabbi, Leiter left theology behind to pursue painting, moving to New York in 1946. Encouraged by figures like Richard Poussette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith, he began experimenting with photography in 1948, mostly using 35mm Kodachrome film to capture his neighborhood and friends. After a period of success in fashion photography—working with magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Elle—he drifted into semi-obscurity. It wasn’t until the 2006 publication of Early Color that his pioneering contribution to color photography was widely recognized. Today his work is housed in major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Leiter died in his East Village apartment on November 26, 2013, leaving behind an enormous archive. As Margalit Fox wrote in The New York Times, “Of the tens of thousands of images he took—many now considered among the finest street photographs ever made—the majority remain unprinted.”
The exhibition is produced by Vertigo Syndrome, curated by Anne Morin, in collaboration with DiChroma Photography.
About the Author
Born the son of a prominent rabbi, Saul Leiter rejected the religious path laid out for him and moved to New York in 1946 to pursue painting. Introduced into the art world by figures such as Richard Poussette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith, he began experimenting with photography in 1948, shooting both black-and-white and color with 35mm Kodachrome film. His subjects were often close to home: a small circle of friends and everyday scenes on the streets outside his East Village apartment.
Though he achieved recognition as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and other magazines, Leiter remained largely out of the spotlight for decades. It wasn’t until 2006, with the publication of Early Color, that his work received widespread international acclaim, securing his place as a pioneer of color photography.
Today, his photographs are housed in major museum collections around the world—from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Victoria and Albert Museum—attesting to the lasting power of his artistic vision.
Saul Leiter passed away on November 26, 2013, in his East Village home. As The New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox noted:
“Of the tens of thousands of images he took—many now considered among the finest street photographs ever made—the majority remain unprinted.”
Saul Leiter: Una finestra punteggiata di gocce di pioggia
until July 27, 2025
Belvedere of the Royal Villa of Monza – Monza (Milan) – Italy
More info:
(cover picture Untitled, undated © Saul Leiter Foundation)
