For many a fan of the art form, a cache of previously unseen images taken by a renowned photographer that suddenly see the light of day is like Christmas come early. The new book The Unseen Saul Leiter presents a selection of pictures from among the 40,000 colour slides he left behind when he died in 2013, and this Guardian gallery features a number of them.
Evocatively shot soft-colour images of mid-century New York, Leiter's adopted hometown, they underscore his mastery of two of the principal skills of the best photographers: the knack of capturing what Henri Cartier-Bresson famously called the "decisive moment" and the ability to see poetry in the everyday.
The book does, of course, also raise a few questions - primarily, why were these photos unseen in Leiter's lifetime? Perhaps it's because he only gained a reputation and an appreciative audience very late in life and so ran out of time to showcase his work - but perhaps it's because he didn't want the images in the public domain. Mee-Lai Stone describes the book as "meticulously curated by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation", the former having worked closely with the photographer for years and so (you would hope) a respectful custodian of his archive - and yet there's a nagging feeling that this posthumous publication might show a disregard for Leiter's own creative control.
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