The Saul Leiter exhibition at the FOAM photography museum has a lot to offer. Besides photos resembling paintings, and a slice of New York in the heart of Amsterdam, a reminder that in the age of digital overload, photography can still have a soul.
As the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close, we are approaching the bicentennial of the first image recorded using light: “View from the Window at Le Gras.” French physicist and inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce positioned his camera (a camera obscura loaded with a light-sensitive copper plate) through his studio window, aiming the lens at the interior courtyard of his home.
What does the image show? Very little today—just enough to distinguish the shapes of the buildings. Deep shadows fall from two opposite directions of the eight-hour exposure, creating an unreal view—a mix of the sets from the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the paintings of Braque’s early cubism.
Today it is hard to imagine that in 1827, this was the only photograph of reality in the world. A mummified day, a packaged fragment of time and space, transported to another dimension.
While there are no figures visible in the photograph, it does reveal the soul of its creator. His life’s work is contained in the apparitions of those houses. In that languorous afterimage that Niépce might have seen when he looked out the window before closing his eyes and dreaming of how to capture it.
I have the same experience as I drift off to sleep at 7:30 am on my way from Warsaw to Amsterdam. The view from the window in a plane above the clouds. Sunrise and a thought: without a chemical smell, real photography does not exist. The last vapors are still hanging in the air, but our lazy habits are disturbing its reception. Today we do not take photographs with “the pencil of nature,” to cite William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography. We extract them from something that was created digitally. These images are ubiquitous, undulating, and transparent. They last no longer than the time it takes to look at them.
A soft landing in front of the slender nineteenth-century tenement house of the FOAM photography museum. The facade’s reflection shimmers in the green-brown water. From the fairy tale of Amsterdam’s canals, the tangle of mini-bridges and narrow streets, I am immersed in the New York of the 1940s, fifties and beyond.
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The title of Saul Leiter’s retrospective, An Unfinished World, is ambiguous—an incomplete world, or an infinite world? It immediately halts my comparisons with other American photographers from the same period. I am just with Saul Leiter. With a single, consistent vision for over sixty years. Despite the intimacy of the exhibition, it consists of some two hundred works. A quarter of them are gouaches and watercolors, the latter intertwined with groups of photographs—a simple curatorial move that makes the relationships between them clear. The abstract smudges, on handmade Japanese paper in pastel colors, spilled and splashed like spatters from a pen nib, constitute a translucent play of colors. Along with some of the semi-figurative and abstract photographs, they subtly create the mood.
There is no point in looking for meaning; it is enough to allow yourself to be drawn in, to become lost, to dissolve. In the case of photography, this can be challenging: it is a realistic medium, and introducing blur, ambiguity, and shape play into a photograph can easily turn into stagey kitsch.
Leiter plays with the plasticity of architectural forms. He often leaves one element of the composition that is sharp and easily identifiable. In “White Circle, 1958,” a white circle drifts like a lifebuoy among beetroot-toned solid forms. And we drift with it. The eye wanders; we experience the pure pleasure of breaking away from the conformities of vision.
Critics link Leiter with the group of photographers that formed the New York School, and often with abstract expressionism. But does this kind of organizing, this assigning to one style or another, really explain anything? Fortunately, there are artists who disrupt this attempt at order. They often pay the price with a lack of artistic recognition—this is what happened to Leiter, who only entered the public eye in 2006 (aged eighty-three!) with the publication of his album Early Color.
His solo exhibitions in Europe began in 2008. I was fortunate enough to see his exhibition Emergence de la couleur at the Camera Obscura Gallery in Paris. Seventeen years later, I am discovering the same emotions here at FOAM—just deepened by the way in which these photographs travel through time. The way in which the gaze of each viewer accumulates within them. And the way in which these photographs thus acquire an increasingly delicate consistency. Inadequate interpretation, inappropriate criticism, and all poetry disappears. And along with it, the soul of these photographs. Because a soul cannot be trained. It is either there or not. The people who know this are those who can express it, those who are recipients, collectors—those for whom art constitutes a general necessity for life.
This need is visible in Amsterdam. I visited the exhibition at noon. It was empty. Paradoxically, this would have been a dream situation for Leiter, who was a happy recluse. In Tomas Leach’s 2013 documentary In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, the artist says: “When I look back on my life and how badly prepared I was for living in the world, I was astonished that I had the nerve to have the illusion that I could manage to survive.”
At 2:00 pm, the exhibition rooms are full. A surprising range of ages. Lone, elegant older ladies, couples with faces like those from seventeenth-century portraits of Dutch burghers, teenagers in baggy trousers reminiscent of decomposed Baroque dresses . . . This kind of culture is needed by such an audience. They move in slow motion past miniatures of another world. Perhaps some people have equally vague memories of their childhoods in the 1950s and sixties, similar to those captured in Leiter’s photographs. Meanwhile, the young are amazed to discover that reality need not resemble the surrealism of Instagram.
The semi-darkness in the exhibition rooms subtly highlights the delicacy of the vintage prints, co-creating the nobility of the presented works. The concentration of the Amsterdammers . . . Aren’t they looking at a piece of their own history? After all, it was their ancestors who founded the settlement of New Amsterdam, in 1624, in what is now Lower Manhattan.
Small formats, some the size of postcards, some even smaller. They draw the viewer into the depths of the photographs, like in Antonioni’s Blow-Up.
Everything around me starts swimming. Those who wear glasses know the sensation. A haze of blurred lights, shapes, unclosed lines, and fluffy, contour-less forms. The movement of the colored smudges creates an additional spatial, 3D effect. Emotions in their purest form. The natural chemical of sensuality.
There is no space here for wars, death, crying, cataclysms, torn bodies, or cruelty. This is not World Press Photo. Yes, human dramas exist, but on the scale of individual experience. These are photographs of details, of consciously isolated spaces. Fragments of everyday life, of the flowing world, as in the woodcuts and drawings of Hokusai Katsushika.
Instead, there are dewy panes of glass, seen from the depths of warm interiors. Raindrops, dripping in rivulets. They are multiplied in the reflections of windows, the repeatedly interpenetrating shapes of objects and people. We can wander among them with our gaze, as if diving underwater. They are captured in one moment, but they could just as easily have been captured in another. Because in Leiter’s photographs, time is fluid and space is relative. It is not an indicator of content or composition. The material is the matter itself—in the organic, physical sense: snow, rain, puddle, natural light, electric lights, shadows, dresses, shoes, umbrellas, hats. Fragments of life on a New York street. Realism. The photographer’s journey, random, yet repeatable—that is, with intention—and the poetry that results from it. And soul. Human soul. Slides with unreal colors, prints from photo labs.
Lots of coincidences and defects. This is fortunate for Leiter, and revealing for the viewer, because he was able to compile them—consistently—into an image of the world in which he lived. From 1952 until his death in 2013, Leiter resided in Manhattan’s East Village—in the same premises that also served as his studio, like Vermeer in Delft. “How much do you have to do to satisfy people who don’t care anyway? […] [I’m a] person who sometimes used a camera with a touch of intelligence, but not too much,” he said in the documentary.
Will artificial intelligence learn to make mistakes, will it go astray? Will it create and compose based on these oversights? Are errors algorithmic? In our current paradise of data assimilation, will AI commit original sin?
As far back as the 1980s, French surgeon and biologist Henri Laborit argued that unless artificial intelligence was aware of its own existence and able to take care of itself like a human, it would never become independent.
Recently, at my friend’s birthday party, one of the guests postulated a thesis about the future disappearance of physicality, the dematerialization of the human body. “Only human consciousness will remain. Earth, our planet, will not withstand this devastation, it will disappear in a slow cataclysm. Like a chronic illness. We will have to move our consciousness, our mind, somewhere else,” he concluded. In that case, I thought, the digitization and archiving of all collections is nothing more than packing for a journey into outer space or to another dimension. Therefore, as a civilization, we are living in an era of great relocation.
Or are we? Maybe it’s like in the song “Across the Universe”? “Nothing’s gonna change my world,” sang John Lennon. Except that nothing is not just nothing, but Nothing. It is emptiness, stillness, the Buddhist state of enlightenment. A reality drained of the everyday—chaotically scattered pieces of life. “There’s a certain kind of charm and comfort in disorder that not everyone appreciates . . . To know everything is not good. To be in a state of pleasant confusion, sometimes, can be very satisfying. [ . . .] The important thing in life is not what you get, but what you throw out,” says Leiter.
And this is probably more plausible. It is precisely Nothing that dominates his photographs—without ostentation, naturally. There are no more or less important parts within them; just like in painting, every square centimeter becomes a created surface.
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AI accelerates the process of learning about reality, like Louis Daguerre’s 1838 daguerreotype, “Boulevard du Temple.” Those who looked at it with a magnifying glass were amazed to find they could count the roof tiles of a four-story tenement house—something that was impossible to observe in person.
Leiter started out as a painter before moving to New York, and he continued to paint throughout his life, freely combining different techniques. Among other things, he created small, painterly preparatory sketches for fashion photography. He also experimented with black-and-white portraits, painting on them and thus adding “life” to them, according to the curator of the exhibition, Claartje van Dijk.
The exhibition space itself—especially the first, introductory room—is cramped. In its center, two diagonal walls form a triangle with a projection of Leach’s film, as if we were meant to squeeze into the past. The oldest photographs are here, black and white, from the 1940s. Leiter was in his twenties then (he was born in 1923) and was already capturing the motifs that would resonate in his art for many years to come.
In the first room there is also a screening of fragments of Tomas Leach’s film. “Viewers entering Leiter’s world are greeted by his own voice,” says Claartje van Dijk. “As they explore further parts of the exhibition, they discover spaces where the colors of the walls—pale green and pink—are inspired by the 1950s and sixties, the period in which Leiter worked intensively as a fashion photographer. He was collaborating with Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, and at the same time developing his personal photographic and painting work.”
Visitors explore the exhibition in concentration and silence. Whispering, I ask someone, “What do you see in these photos?” They reply, “These photos have a soul. It’s the flow of something that can’t be translated into words.”
Figures woven into the multi-layer forms of the city; individual hands, legs, feet, seen from behind, and everything that surrounds Leiter in the urban space. That which is between him and the object of focus. This space in between takes up much of the photograph’s surface, and is a story in itself. Art par excellence. “I don’t recall sort of planning to photograph certain things. […] I go out with my camera, and I take pictures because I enjoy catching certain moments. Of course, I don’t know that I’m going to get what I’m going to get. It takes time,” he said in the documentary.
All the motifs that were touched and commenced in black and white begin to blossom into color in the 1950s. “When I think to myself, I very often think of colors. I think of painting . . .”—Leiter’s statement reflects the change well. His photograph Harlem, 1960 is a synthesis of several artistic trends: painterly—in the way the signs are juxtaposed, resembling clippings from different points of view—and photographic, where the man captured in motion, in a tight frame, consolidates and clarifies the composition, preventing it from disintegrating into separate parts.
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In Leiter’s work, color arises from visual experiences, not just from the splendor of the New York street. It is too simple, therefore, to call him merely a pioneer of color—behind this layer there lies a much more subtle history of artistic exploration, of meanderings between photography and painting.
The first photos include Leiter’s self-portraits and portraits of people close to him: father, mother, brother, friends, and women. He moves to New York, leaving behind the roots of his Orthodox Jewish family. “I think I said [to my father] something very unkind, like that I didn’t plan to be a professional Jew for the rest of my life.”
He wants to become a painter. He becomes a photographer. He works for color fashion magazines without giving up his way of seeing. However, the models with their professional poses lack that aura of intimacy. Instead, it is his personal friendships that provide material of emotional depth. Various women appear in his photographs over the years: Ana, Kathy, Gloria, Inez, Barbara, Mary, Deborah, Jean, Marianne, Fay, Adele, Peggy, Dottie, Jay, Lynn. And Soames. Soames Bantry.
“We shared a love of art and painting and books [ . . . ]. I would sit in this room and look over and see her. I liked looking over and seeing Soames rocking away and listening to music. [ . . . ] [S]he loved New York. [ . . . ] Soames believed in my work at a time when people were not terribly interested in it. [ . . . ] But she’s not here. It’s all my fault. Her death is my fault. I killed her. How did I do it? I don’t know. But it’s my fault. From time to time, I have to face the fact that almost everything is my fault.” This is Leiter’s most dramatic statement in Tomas Leach’s film. For seventy-five minutes we watch the artist bustling around his apartment and studio. He sorts through his archive, pulling out negatives, prints, slides, and small pictures and objects, including things he gave to Soames and recovered after her death in 2002.
Soames is a continual presence in Leiter’s photographs. One of them shows a fragment of a New York street at dusk, the focus fixed on a raindrop-covered windowpane. We don’t know if there’s a woman there, or where. But the title is Walk with Soames, 1958. She is floating somewhere above, not a ghost, but a soul.
As viewers, we feel and absorb colors and qualities as we do a smell. Fleeting and changing, yet strangely alive. We are touched by the soul of this photograph—the self-awareness and identity of its author. And then, illuminated like one of those New York neon signs, the word culture. These are the components that are ubiquitous in Leiter’s photographs. “The real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe. […] Though we like to pretend that what is public […] is what the real world is all about.”
I walk through the exhibition rooms. I discover more photographs: female nudes in black and white. The subtlety of the physicality of bodies, feelings. And love—each photograph is like a love letter.
In today’s world of online dating sites akin to modified, processed food, Saul Leiter’s photographs have a taste of heavenly sensuality.
That’s all I need. I leave the gallery, moved. It’s warm, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Blue sky. Opposite FOAM, on the other side of the Keizersgracht canal, is the Van Loon Museum with its small, French-style garden. In the middle is a sprawling plane tree. Suddenly, Leiter’s photographs of snowy New York streets come flooding back to me. Single figures flitting among the suspended white snowflakes. A red umbrella. I feel calmed.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, we can generate almost anything in the visual arts. This approach is nothing new: Sandro Botticelli retouched the portrait of Simonetta Vespucci to meet the ideal of European Renaissance beauty; Rembrandt, in “The Night Watch,” composed the guard of 18 musketeers (after all, they didn’t all pose at once in the street, by the canal!); Cézanne applied a mental vision grid (like giant pixels) to “Mont Sainte-Victoire,” which he painted multiple times from different angles; van Gogh reproduced his landscape with crows, with the sky at night, the wheat field in the sun, and so on.
In his autobiography Room to Dream, David Lynch recalls his first experience with Photoshop—the AI version of the photography darkroom: “I still don’t know how to do more than one tiny fraction of what Photoshop probably can do, but whoever dreamed it up and keeps making it better should be awarded a special place in heaven.”
Meanwhile, the Rijksmuseum has organized an exhibition called American Photography from its own collection. Spanning the history of American photography from 1840 to the present, this comprehensive exhibition explores the diverse functions of the medium and reflects the evolution of American society. It shows how photography helped to foster the American myth of world power; how it manipulated and created; how it preserved family memories; how it advertised a reality that one could purchase and live happily. Big cars, huge highways, idyllic homes, presidential elections, wars, tribal chiefs, Coca-Cola. Dreams.
There is no space in which photography would not exist.
The Rijksmuseum exhibition includes one black and white photograph by Saul Leiter—Street Scene, 1947. Much like Leiter’s other work, it does not reveal much about the post-war American dream. But we know that’s not what he’s telling us about. He is a poet. He sees and highlights a lone man standing on the street. A dark silhouette in contrast, in the aura of the sun. On the edge of light and shadow.
On the way back from Amsterdam to Warsaw, outside the window: the wing of the plane and the night. After the Saul Leiter exhibition, I feel European, and I know a little better why.
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An Unfinished World was co-created by curator Anne Morin from the diChroma Foundation and the FOAM photography museum in Amsterdam. It is open until April 20, 2025.
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