Paul's Postcard: Saul Leiter

Mr. Leiter captured the passing illusions of everyday life with a precision that might almost seem scientific, if it weren't so poetically resonant and visually layered.

His images depict a complex interaction of people, architecture and weather that is full of fragmented, partial, veiled or multiplied forms and figures. People are seen through plate-glass surfaces covered with condensation, or in mirrors that slice up space. Their distant forms can be veiled in snow and shrouded by a building canopy that descends on the scene like a too solid final curtain, as is the case with ''Canopy, New York.'' In the end his subject is the urban visual experience -- not people on the street, but what they see.

- Roberta Smith (The New York Times)


Saul Leiter's "Canopy (New York)", 1958