“Before he died, he said that what we had seen of his work was just the tip of the iceberg, and we’re really only now finding out what he meant,” said Michael Parillo, the associate director of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which has been hard at work to bring more of Leiter’s color photography into the world. What his reticence meant, practically speaking, was that many thousands of the pictures he took over almost seven decades were never developed, printed, or seen during his lifetime, despite the fame that came thundering to his doorstep with the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color. “I wasn’t burdened by importance,” he said a few years before his death in 2013, synopsizing a devotion to unfettered autonomy that has itself come to shape his legacy. Among the great or later-to-be-great New York photographers of the middle of the last century, Saul Leiter bested them all in caring the least about fame or legacy.
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