Saul Leiter Retrospective in Hamburg
No, I’m not dead and this blog is not dead either. It’s just that I’ve not had anything worth reporting that is photography-related to in the last … year.
OK, I was on a very exciting two-week trip to Myanmar in December and January, but I haven’t even sorted out the image yet. Otherwise I’ve been so busy with photogether (getting the webpage up and running, organizing and describing trips, working out presentations for the technical courses) that I haven’t had a chance to go out and photograph. I’ve barely made about 50 images of my son during the last 12 months and that’s it!
(c) Saul Leiter
However today I did something worth writing about: I went to see Saul Leiter’s “Retrospective” in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. I was quite curious about this exhibit since my appreciation of Saul’s images has not been very pronounced in the past. I own two of his color books, but I was not familiar with his black-and-white work, and there ware many black-and-white images on display there. I also attended the first public screening of the documentary on Saul Leiter about a month ago, so I knew a good bit about the photographer before I attended the exhibit.
Well, what can I say? I am still not a big fan of Saul’s work… His images are complex, multi-layered, thought-provoking, (mostly) subtly colorful, all of which sounds very exciting, but I was not able to develop a relationship to his images.
On the other hand I did find 5 to 10 images that I’d like to own and look at, and the one below is a personal favorite. Maybe because it is not very typical for Saul…
(c) Saul Leiter