Early Color by American photographer Saul Leiter was made principally in New York between 1948 and 1960, using everyday urban encounters to explore color, ambiguity, and the visual possibilities of familiar places. Leiter began using color slide film around 1948, two years after moving to New York to pursue painting. At a time when color photography was closely tied to magazines and advertising, his noncommissioned pictures treated it as an independent language. He rejected a sociological reading of his figures and described photographs instead as fragments drawn from "endless possibilities."
Pedestrians, shoppers, workers, taxis, buses, signs, and storefronts populate the images, yet people often appear distant, cropped, reflected, or partly hidden. Rain, snow, condensation, umbrellas, and windows turn streets into layered surfaces. Oblique framing, intersecting planes, gridded bars, and large dark foreground areas complicate spatial depth, while flashes of vivid red and other saturated accents punctuate otherwise muted fields of color, shadow, and haze. These devices create a quiet, enigmatic atmosphere in which city life remains recognizable but resists immediate explanation. The asymmetry, cropping, and secondary colors also connect Leiter's photography to painters he admired, including Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.
Leiter worked with Kodachrome and Anscochrome slide film using an Argus C3, Auto Graflex Junior, and early Rolleiflex, then primarily a Leica M3 from 1954. He experimented with 50 mm, 150 mm, and other telephoto lenses and generally preferred to see what happened rather than plan a picture. The color work first circulated as projected 35 mm transparencies in his studio, at The Club, and in Edward Steichen's 1957 Museum of Modern Art slide lecture. Beginning in 1993, Ilford funding enabled Ilfochrome printing with Laumont Editions, and later exhibitions combined Cibachrome, Ilfochrome, chromogenic, and other print types.
The corpus gained its first major public consolidation in Howard Greenberg Gallery's 2005-06 New York exhibition, followed by Steidl's 2006 first monograph, a compact 176-page volume containing 100 color photographs. The exhibition later traveled to venues in Antwerp, Bangor, Los Angeles, London, Atlanta, and Lausanne. Milwaukee Art Museum's 2006-07 In Living Color became Leiter's first solo U.S. museum exhibition, while the National Gallery of Art acquired a circa-1998 print of Through Boards in 2006. Early Color also entered the reassessment of color photography's history, complicating accounts centered on William Eggleston while resisting a single-pioneer narrative.
