Why do I so love Saul Leiter

For one thing, I seem to be unfashion-

able. Ascending the stairs one evening 

at my club at Princeton, an upper-class-

man unbuttoned the top button on my bla-

zer, announcing that we didn't do that, 

in the club. Another, confiding to me 

in his dressing gown in the club library 

one evening, spoke with sorrow at his dis-

covery that my father was "in industry."

They were pleading, Sock me, as if to say

where they were from. But I liked New York.

Saul Leiter is to photography as Arthur

Miller is to the stage. Here is a picture

of two undoubted fathers, finally going

home one evening in the city of New York.

Are they Willy Loman? Are they laughable?

But then one learns, Loman was not laugh-

able. So are they, Stoical, comrades in

certainty and respect for each other, in

the bourgeois carousel of American pros-

perity after the destruction of the world?

Are there snarky little fillips of modern-

ity: John Kennedy's My father always told

me, businessmen were sons of bitches, for

example, as American steel slid into its

uncompetitive demise? A Kennedy, on greed?

American steel. I look at this picture,

and I hear Miller tell me, all the slings

and arrows did miss the mark Leiter found.

If, after de Sica in Ladri di bicic-

lette, Leiter comes wonderfully close

to capturing our post-War father, he

is our grittier Jacques Demy from Les

parapluies de Cherbourg in saving for

us the brilliants of the city - what

our warranted jam-producer calls, the

little scarlets. Here they are, the

heels of the matron turning east at

the intersection, the compression we

somehow cherish of city life, a mash-

up of fumes and distillations of spec-

tacular vitality. Reek to me, New York.

Sock me.

Saul Leiter

1923 - 2013

Greenberg Gallery

New York

Nick Truelove