And you don’t need a course on Matisse or Manet to recognize the cleverness in using bands and blocks of pure black to ignite a picture’s palettea standard Leiter strategy, singularly effective, and rare in early photographic color. Japanese prints and the paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard have been invoked, with Leiter’s approval, as precursors for the photographer’s flattened spaces, sharply angled perspectives, and muted, slashed, or flame-like color. Signature Leiter moveseverywhere apparent in this portfolio of previously unpublished picturesinclude shooting through fog-blurred or rain-streaked windows, catching figures in shadow or from behind, focusing on hands and feet rather than faces, integrating frames within frames, allowing reflections and bold blurred shapes to tangle and fill out the compositions.

Spanning the years, they qualify, for this viewer, as the work of a consummate “termite artist”Manny Farber’s unglamorous term for a quietly obsessive lone artist nibbling away at a particular corner of experience, nourished by curiosity and an ever-renewable capacity for aesthetic discovery. Leiter’s color photographs can seem at once reticent and ecstatic, playful and contemplative. As if by a flash of lightning, the book established Leiter, born in 1923, as a pioneer of color photography, as astute, avid, and inventive as any of his better-known colleagues, contemporaries, and successors. Retrieved by Leiter only decades later, and nearly all printed for the first time, the pictures emerged as a revelatory pageant. This monograph, which has just reappeared in a fourth edition, contains roughly eighty photographs taken as color slides predominantly in the 1940s and ’50s (with several dating from 1960).

IN 2006, AFTER A TEN-YEAR SEARCH for a publisher, New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery persuaded Steidl to issue Saul Leiter’s first book, Early Color. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day.

So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life and whether this is living.

Saul leiter prints