We call photography “art” with casual unthinkingness now. In Florence there’s a Selfie Museum just round the corner from the museum containing Michelangelo’s David. Can we really describe both as art? But maybe it’s the wrong question. As EH Gombrich put it: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” And the exquisite exhibition at MK Gallery of Saul Leiter’s pictures of postwar New York is a masterclass in demonstrating how a photographer can be an artist.
The artist, not the lens, took his pictures. They are no more spontaneous than a Constable landscape – even though both appear unplanned and immediate. But like a plein air painter who’s put in years of looking at landscape masterpieces before taking brushes out into the fields, Leiter looked at the street life of Manhattan with an eye shaped by artistic knowledge and precise ideals of beauty.
That may seem far from obvious on first entering this show. Leiter loved to take pictures from the elevated L train, snapping people from above, or through a street window as they walked, heads down in the rain, oblivious to his camera. He is famous as a “pioneer of colour photography”, which is a boring way to describe him. This exhibition proves he’s just as brilliant in black and white. What holds you and keeps you looking is his eye for the dancing loveliness of everyday life.
In Pull, taken in about 1960, New Yorkers struggle through the snow that reduces buildings to ghostly grey towers behind them. It’s the restraint of his colour that makes this picture so gorgeous: a glimpse of a red car, a small yellow sign, the brown coat of the woman in the foreground. What luck to grab such a random shot in which life composes itself by chance like an impressionist painting. Except it’s not luck at all.
This show immerses you in the flow and surprise of Leiter’s photography yet also shows how it is rooted in clear aesthetic values and strongly felt artistic influences. He doesn’t just point his camera. He finds chance and arbitrariness because he is looking for these things, and uses all his artistry to bring them out.
Leiter moved to New York City as a young man in 1946, having given up a theology degree, because he wanted to be an artist – at a moment when New York was full of them. The abstract expressionist painters – Pollock, Rothko and the rest – were about to become famous. Leiter too wanted to paint. The photographs in this show are interspersed with his abstract paintings, often done on fine Japanese paper; they are gently peppered with pinks and yellows in a way that’s reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler and Willem de Kooning. One very Rothko-esque painting was done in 1970, the year Rothko died, surely as a memorial. You can also see connections with these artists in his photography as when he boldly frames street life under a huge Rothko rectangle of a red awning.
Leiter painted all his life without ever being a success at it, or apparently minding that he wasn’t. In a film at the end of the show he sits in his studio surrounded by canvases, glowing with happiness as he remembers his life of bohemian hardship. There were times when he got evicted, he laughs, when he had no money at all even though he did get work as a fashion photographer – some of his alluring 1950s Harper’s Bazaar covers are here.
Some people don’t trust beauty, he says, they think an artist like Renoir is corny. He on the other hand always chased “a certain idea of beauty”. And that idea was formed by art. Take his eye for umbrellas. They recur in so many of his pictures that a lab assistant once complained they were becoming a cliche. One example is Footprints, taken in about 1950 in which a red umbrella is seen from above, covering the pedestrian who is adding more footprints to a snowy sidewalk. It’s another moment when beauty surges through the usually unrecorded flow of the everyday.
Renoir’s most famous paintings include The Umbrellas, in which a stylish Parisian crowd in the 1880s all promenade under their parapluies in the rain. But it’s not just a passion for umbrellas that Leiter shares with French impressionism. The beauty of rain and snow, the romance of city life, a woman passing by whom he’ll never see again: Leiter is an impressionist with a camera. Yet he also traced the influences on the impressionists themselves, collecting books on Japanese woodblock prints and their art of the “floating world” in which beauty is seen in the casual moment as people carry umbrellas on a rainy day in old Edo.
Leiter doesn’t just look at women from afar as they pass by. His bohemian life wasn’t lonely. A succession of girlfriends posed for him, from a romantic portrait in the grounds of the Cloisters museum to the nudes that conclude the show. He really is unabashed by his quest for beauty. In front of these imaginatively posed erotic photos you realise it’s not just his visual intelligence that makes Leiter a true artist but the sheer joy he took in life.
• Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, from 17 February to 2 June
