Paying tribute to legendary photographer Saul Leiter on 10th Street

Top 2 photos by Derek Berg

Last Wednesday evening, Village Preservation unveiled a plaque honoring acclaimed American photographer and painter Saul Leiter at 111 E. 10th St. between Second Avenue and Third Avenue, where he lived and worked from 1952 to his death in 2013. 

Speakers included critic and curator Vince Aletti, a longtime East Village resident who is the former art editor and photography critic for The Village Voice, photo exhibition reviewer for The New Yorker, and author of "A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines" (2019). (You can read a recent interview with him at Vanity Fair here.)

This marked Village Preservation's 24th plaque unveiling ... including markers on the homes of notable figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Mingus. (Photo by Steven)

A ceremony to honor acclaimed photographer Saul Leiter on 10th Street

Tomorrow (Wednesday) evening at 6, Village Preservation will unveil a plaque honoring acclaimed American photographer and painter Saul Leiter at 111 E. 10th St. between Second Avenue and Third Avenue, where he lived and worked from 1952 to his death in 2013.

Per Village Preservation:

We will hear about Leiter’s approach to street photography, much of which took place in the East Village, and about the painterly quality of his color work and the features that made him one of the key figures in the New York school of photography. 

This marks Village Preservation's 24th plaque unveiling ... including markers on the homes of notable figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Mingus.

Learn more about the Leiter ceremony and program here. The event is free, though Village Preservation asks folks to register in advance.

A 'Centennial' celebration of Saul Leiter

10th Street and Third Avenue © Saul Leiter Foundation

Dec. 3 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of celebrated photographer Saul Leiter, who's now the subject of a new exhibition showcasing his work's range.

The Howard Greenberg Gallery is hosting "Centennial," which features more than 40 photographs, paintings and painted photographs, many of which have never been on public view in the United States. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Saul Leiter Foundation, coincides with the recently released book, "Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective."

Here's more about Leiter via the EVG inbox...

Saul Leiter photographed and painted nearly every day for over 60 years. He made an enormous and unique contribution to photography during a highly prolific period in New York City in the 1950s as an early pioneer of color. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out from the work of his New York School contemporaries. 

Often, he found inspiration within a few blocks of his apartment in lower Manhattan, seeking beauty in the ordinary, and capturing intimate moments, both indoors and on the streets. 

The exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery will survey his black-and-white as well as his color photographs including portraiture and cityscapes from the 1940s-1960s, his paintings (on which he worked until the end of his life) including abstract watercolors and painted photographs, and his fashion photography from Harper's Bazaar circa 1960.

Leiter lived and worked at 111 E. 10th St. between Second Avenue and Third Avenue from 1952 to his death in 2013. The studio is now home to the Saul Leiter Foundation, which is cataloging his more than 80,000 works. 

The Howard Greenberg Gallery is at 41 E. 57th St. between Park and Madison. Gallery hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and  Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

RIP Saul Leiter

Longtime neighborhood resident Saul Leiter, "one of the first professionals to photograph New York City regularly in color," died on Tuesday. He was 89.

To the Times:

Where other New York photographers of the period were apt to document the city’s elements discretely — streets, people, buildings — Mr. Leiter captured the almost indefinable spaces where all three intersect, many of them within a two-block radius of the East Village apartment in which he had lived since the early 1950s.

Unplanned and unstaged, Mr. Leiter’s photographs are slices fleetingly glimpsed by a walker in the city. People are often in soft focus, shown only in part or absent altogether, though their presence is keenly implied. Sensitive to the city’s found geometry, he shot by design around the edges of things: vistas are often seen through rain, snow or misted windows.

There's a documentary about his life and work, "In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter," now on the film-festival circuit. (A DVD is forthcoming.) Meanwhile, check out the trailer here…

[Top image by Saul Leiter, via; H/T EVG reader Muzz]