FRANÇOIS HALARD SAUL LEITER
EN MÉMOIRE DE
SAUL LEITER
for Margit and Suzanne
1923 – 2013
FRANÇOIS HALARD SAUL LEITER
SAUL LEITER New York, Winter 2015
I receive a phone call from my friend Suzanne. She tells me that she has just bought her neighbor’s apartment and asks me if I have any interest in photographing its interior. The apartment is situated two steps from my very apartment, on the same street, 10th Street, in New York City’s East Village. The address she gives me corresponds to the studio and apartment of Saul Leiter. Years ago, I discovered Leiter’s photographic sensibility in Jane Livingston’s book The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963. So it is that I too have found inspiration on the same streets, in the same neighborhood as he. In this empty—or almost empty—apartment, I find a few of the things that Leiter has left behind: a high-back chair where he sat to paint and to drink his coffee, a light box poised on a wooden pedestal table, a large box of expired Kodak paper, Noguchi lanterns, and his hat. And then, there is the light, a fragile, gentle winter light. It’s snowing in the city, and through the studio window I take my first photographs of the garden, under the snow, as he might have done. His presence lingers, almost visible. Later, I share with Margit—director of the Saul Leiter Foundation—these first 122 images of the apartment, Number 4. “Your photographs make me smile because I remember how Saul always dreamed of being a minimalist. He told me a number of times he wished for just a room with nothing in it except a bed, a bedside table, and one book.” I return one year later. Margit allows me to photograph his watercolor notebooks and his camera collection. She opens a box of black-and-white female nudes that he shot, on the sofa and on the high-back chair. I am thunderstruck by such intimacy and modernity. François Halard
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Saul Leiter by François Halard is printed in a first edition of 1,500 copies. Special edition of
first
|
special edition
i s b n 978–91–88113–09–2
50 numbered copies with signed archival pigment print, plus 6 Artist Proofs, in clothbound slipcase. j a pa n e se e di t ion
Edited and designed by Tony Cederteg Japanese edition of 100 numbered copies with signed archival pigment print, in clothbound slipcase. Choice of 10 prints — 10 copies of each. Sold exclusively in Tokyo through Twelvebooks. Published in Stockholm, Sweden by Libraryman. Prepress and printing in Gothenburg, Sweden by Göteborgstryckeriet. Bound in Malmö, Sweden by Förlagshuset Nordens Grafiska. Photographs © 2017 François Halard Copyright © 2017 Libraryman Photographs taken in 2015 in New York, USA in late painter and photographer Saul Leiter’s East Village apartment. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. www.libraryman.se
i s b n 978–91–88113–10–8
EN MÉMOIRE DE SAU L LEITER