Last week in the Portland neighborhood, a group of students rolled out the red carpet for a launch party for its second book ever published. The Neighborhood House Youth Photography Club released “Where Photos Come to Life,” a book of photos captured by students from ages 5 to 18 in west Louisville.

“I think it feels good to them to see the product of their work and to really have it celebrated,” said Jennie Jean Davidson, executive director of Neighborhood House.

The nonprofit community center supports children, families and senior citizens in the West End.

The center also teaches the photography club how to use professional cameras properly and how to capture the best shots.

The group spent the last three years taking photos of their friends and community members. They had the opportunity to capture scenes at Churchill Downs, the Parklands of Floyds Fork, and West End neighborhoods like Russell and Shawnee.

“We started doing this before the pandemic,” Davidson said. “Really giving the kids cameras and sending them out to document their world and [Neighborhood House] with their friends, and really use that as a way — first of all — to help them just express themselves and do some creative work, but also to do some skill building and photography.”

This is the second book the Youth Photography Club has created.

The club is meant to give children in the West End new opportunities and provide them with an artistic outlet, said Ebony Smith, a program director with Neighborhood House.

“We in the Portland community don’t have a lot of resources,” she said. “I just feel like [the kids] were able to receive just a lot of education and knowledge around photography as a whole. So, I think it’s great that we do provide that service here and that they do have that program and that we can just help excel the kids in the area.”

The club’s founder, George Williams, is a photographer for the Louisville Defender, a newspaper that has focused on the local Black community since 1933.

One evening in 1946, Saul Leiter took a train from his native Pittsburgh to New York. Aged 22, he was leaving behind his family and friends as well as the life that had been mapped out for him by his father, an esteemed orthodox rabbi, who had expected his son to follow in his footsteps. “I turned away from everything he believed in and cared about,” Leiter would later say, that decision having caused a rift between them that was never healed.

That youthful act of self-determination led to a long estrangement from his family, though his mother secretly kept in touch with him. It also started Leiter on a singular creative journey that would culminate some 60 years later with his belated canonisation as one of the most gifted and mysterious photographers of the latter half of the 20th century.

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“Saul lost everything when he moved to New York,” says Anne Morin, curator of Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World, a major retrospective of his work that opens soon at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. “But, even though he rejected his upbringing, it shaped him as an artist. From the moment he left Pittsburgh, he was someone who did not fit into any community, artistic or otherwise. He lived like a monk in his New York apartment and led an almost clandestine creative life, totally uninterested in fame or even recognition.”

In a recently published book, Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, Leiter sums up his outlook during his long years of obscurity. “I wasn’t ambitious or driven,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I don’t admire success the way some people do. I was fortunate to fulfil my ambition to be unsuccessful.”

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Like Vivian Maier, the nanny whose secret archive was discovered a few years after her death in 2009, Leiter shot on the streets of Manhattan. Yet while she wandered far and wide, he stayed close to home, never venturing beyond a few blocks’ radius of his apartment on East 10th Street. Unlike William Klein’s frenetic, neon-lit city, or Berenice Abbott’s towering modernist metropolis, Saul Leiter’s New York is an intimately observed world of gesture and detail: luminous, otherworldly and oddly tranquil. Streets and buildings are bathed in soft light and warm colours, his use of reflections, blur and shadow approaching the abstract or dreamlike. People are partially glimpsed in passing cars, or photographed through vertical spaces between buildings or hoardings. Viewed through smeared or steamed-up windows, they sometimes seem like spectral silhouettes.

He captured the city and its people in all seasons, against brightly painted storefronts in summer sunlight, and enveloped in snow or partially obscured by rain in the harsh New York winter. Often, his subjects are caught in moments of quiet reverie amid, but apart from, the city’s bustle and hum.

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“As a photographer, he was never seduced by the idea of New York as the mythical city that never stops,” says Morin. “He was always attuned to the small rather than the big, to the silence rather than the noise. For him, the city revealed itself in the tiny details of everyday life, but he also wanted to somehow peer through the skin of its surface reality to see something else, something ephemeral but full of meaning.”

Leiter’s clandestine creative journey began in 1938, aged 15, when he started painting and sketching in his spare time between school studies. The following year, his mother gave him a Detrola camera, igniting his interest in the medium for which he is now best known, but throughout his life he continued painting. His vast archive contains more than 4,000 abstract pieces and geometric landscapes, mostly watercolours. At the Milton Keynes gallery, the full range of his work will be on display: black and white as well as colour images, fashion photographs, languorously erotic portraits of his longtime partner, Soames Bantry, a former model, and her beautiful friends, as well as his paintings and painted-over photographs.

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“I have intentionally mixed everything together rather than arranging the work in different categories,” says Morin. “Leiter did not have the intention to create an oeuvre, but instead he produced all these fragments that continuously grew and came together to form this huge territory – his unfinished world.”

When he arrived in New York as a young man, Leiter slept on park benches before finding a cheap apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. He befriended the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who became a formative influence, alongside the photographer Eugene Smith. Throughout this time, Leiter’s aversion to success was already apparent: in the 1950s, he turned down an offer of an exhibition from an important art dealer, Betty Parsons, whose patronage was much sought after by other up-and-coming artists. Later in life, he liked to tell the story of how he was admonished for the smallness of his paintings by the artist Franz Kline, who told him: “If you only worked big, you would be one of the boys.”

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Leiter’s temperament was such that he was never going to be one of the boys, but in the late 1950s and throughout the 60s he reluctantly became a fashion photographer in order to survive, as well as finance his more personal work. The images he created for Harper’s Bazaar and later for British magazines such as Nova and Man About Town are captivating in their quiet subversion, but often seem constrained and altogether less atmospheric than his personal work. An exception is a striking image made for Nova, in which he posed Bantry on a stretch of urban wasteground alongside a little boy, both of them intently reading comics against a backdrop of derelict houses. It’s wilfully unglamorous and downbeat, and prefigures the casual, low-key approach of a generation of young, edgy photographers who came of age in the 1980s.

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In the equally mysterious Bantry, Leiter found a soulmate – someone who shared his lack of interest in fame and was also an avid painter. They met in 1958, when she was newly arrived in New York in search of work as a model. For most of their time together they lived in the same building, but in separate apartments, the walls of his work space covered in her oil paintings of flowers and people. “They were two independent souls who had no desire to fit in,” says Morin. “They wanted to be creatively free and to embrace life on their own terms. And, they succeeded.” When Bantry died in 2002 they were living together in her apartment, where Leiter remained, surrounded by her work, until his death in 2013, aged 89.

It was on the streets surrounding their building that he made the colour photographs for which he is now remembered. Their belated discovery challenged the received history of colour photography in America, given that Leiter began experimenting with the tonal possibilities of colour two decades before the likes of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, whose embrace of the same in the early 1970s caused such controversy among critics and traditionalists.

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In the Milton Keynes show, Morin has chosen to give equal prominence to his black and white photographs, which, she says, “have all but disappeared in the myth of Saul Leiter”.

That myth is as much to do with the wilful nature of his clandestine creative life as the quiet audacity of his colour photography. Although his work had fitfully appeared in various group exhibitions in the 1960 and 70s, Leiter did not have a solo exhibition until 1993, when the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York featured some of his black and white photographs.

It wasn’t until a decade later, though, when the same gallery hosted a show entitled Saul Leiter: Early Color, that his photographs really began to garner attention. A book of the same name, his first monograph, was published the following year, when he was 72. It was greeted as revelatory by a photography world taken by surprise by his very existence. “I used to be unknown and that was very restful and pleasurable,” he told the writer Adam Harrison Levy in 2009. “Now I have become known, and people want to interview me.”

In Levy’s essay for Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, he sees a connection between Leiter’s orthodox Jewish upbringing – he once described himself as a “rabbinical ghost” – and his quietly inquiring approach to photography.

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“[Leiter] retained the last vestiges of his Talmudic schooling, where inquiry and the interpretation of texts were taught and fostered. He had absorbed that way of interrogating the world but had transposed it to the visual realm: he saw the streets of New York, and its inhabitants, with the narrative insight of a Talmudic scholar. The streets were his text.”

For all the attention he received in the last decade of his life, Leiter remains an enigma, a remarkably self-effacing artist who walked to his own beat and went out in search of what Morin calls “the incisive moment” every day, on the same few streets, for nigh on 60 years.

“I aspired to be unimportant,” he said of his working life as a photographer of the everyday sublime. In that, at least, he was unsuccessful.

Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 17 February-2 June

In Beebe, Donavon Smallwood Reflects on Ancestry and Land | Atmos

 

02.04.2024

Tender portraits of family, friends, and land offer an intimate glimpse into the photographer’s roots in smalltown Washington.

Beebe is an ongoing project on the paternal side of my family; one that explores our roots in smalltown Washington, North Carolina.

My earliest known ancestor was a member of a church named Beebe Chapel, which still has its foundation and burial grounds behind my grandmother’s home. With that reality in mind, I go out to photograph family members, friends—the land and the water that fractures it.

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The world’s first photograph was clicked by Niépce, born Joseph Nicéphore Niépce on March 7, 1765, in France, hailed from a family of means, with his father being a wealthy attorney. However, the family had to flee during the French Revolution. Nicéphore, originally named Joseph, adopted the name Nicéphore while studying at the Oratorian College in Angers, inspired by Saint Nicephorus. His studies at the college focused on experimental methods in science, leading him to become a professor.

Niépce served as a staff officer in Napoleon’s army, spending considerable time in Italy and Sardinia. Due to illness, he resigned and later married Agnes Romero. Afterward, he became the Administrator of the district of Nice before redirecting his efforts towards scientific research alongside his brother Claude at the family estate in Chalon.

In 1822, Niépce is credited with creating the world’s first photographic etching, using a camera obscura to capture an engraving of Pope Pius VII. Despite an unsteady hand and weak drawing skills, he pursued a way to permanently capture images, experimenting with silver chloride and later bitumen. His successful attempt involved dissolving bitumen in lavender oil, coating pewter, and exposing it inside a camera obscura. This process, taking over eight hours, produced the first surviving photo in 1825 – a building, barn, and tree.

Niépce’s invention, termed a Heliograph, faced challenges in gaining recognition. In 1829, he formed a partnership with Louis Daguerre to improve the process. Sadly, Niépce passed away in 1833 at the age of 69. Daguerre continued their collaboration, developing the Daguerreotype, and received credit for the invention, while Niépce’s contributions were largely overlooked.

Aside from his photographic achievements, Niépce, along with his brother Claude, invented the Pyreolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine, patented in 1807 by Napoleon Bonaparte.

In recognition of Niépce’s contributions, The Niépce Prize was established in 1955, awarded annually to a professional photographer with over three years of residency and work in France. Despite initial obscurity, Niépce’s groundbreaking work in photography was rediscovered in 1952, cementing his legacy as a pioneer in the field.

You might feel you have seen the woman sweeping the gutter in Mark Power’s 2018 photograph somewhere before. Her careful, stooped attitude, the improvised plastic aprons over the puffer jacket and the Dutch-looking point to her hood might all have stepped out of Vermeer’s The Little Street, painted in the 1650s. The brick facades of the row of houses in Baltimore, Maryland, picked out by Power’s large format camera, also gesture towards that Delft hyper-realism – and the implied social questions in the image echo across centuries and continents.

Like the Dutch painter, Power invites you to look hard at each brick, window and railing in his frame. The five houses here, in this precise light, start to take on troubled lives of their own – suspects in an identity parade of urban decline. The poster bottom right advertises the promise of “Total Rehabs”. The mattress at the window, the improvised door frames tell different stories.

Power’s photographs of America often work slowly on the viewer in this way. This picture comes from the fourth volume of the British photographer’s ongoing project Good Morning, America, which began with Barack Obama’s second term in 2012 and has taken in the existential uncertainties of the Trump years. His method seems in the tradition of the “survey” photographic quests that depicted the American landscape in pioneering prospectuses for railroads and westerly migration in the mid-19th century, but in many ways his photographs offer a before and after to those vistas: the scale and grandeur remain but those ambitions are undone in the detail of how things have worked out. Walking through left-behind districts such as this one or getting a vantage on rust-belt factories and drive-throughs and housing projects, his pictures give a constant feel of time arrested; and of the need for proper attention, in every sense.

• Good Morning, America (Volume IV) is published by Gost (£50)