Published by Thames & Hudson in 2023 to coincide with the centenary of Saul Leiter’s birth, The Centennial Retrospective is a 352-page account of an artistic life sustained over more than six decades. Produced in collaboration with the Saul Leiter Foundation, the monograph draws upon an extensive archive, much of which was not publicly seen during Leiter’s lifetime. Its scale allows the familiar photographs to be considered within the larger, more varied practice from which they emerged.
Leiter found much of his subject matter close to his Lower Manhattan apartment. In his New York color photographs of the 1950s and 1960s, street life is not treated as a sequence of decisive events but as an elusive field of atmosphere, interruption and everyday observation. His professional work for Harper’s Bazaar forms another part of the story, alongside black-and-white photographs made during daily walks and the nudes and intimate portraits produced at home.
The book’s distinction lies in resisting a narrow definition of Leiter as a color street photographer. Abstract watercolors, sketchbooks and painted photographs are brought into relation with his camera work, clarifying the continuity between painting and photography across his career. Color, partial views and ordinary surroundings can consequently be understood not as isolated signatures, but as elements within a sustained way of looking. The inclusion of previously unpublished material further broadens that account without separating discovery from context.
For a serious photobook collection, this volume is significant less as an object of presumed rarity than as a substantial, Foundation-supported survey of an unusually interconnected body of work. It places celebrated mid-century New York photographs beside fashion, monochrome, portrait and painted work, preserving the complexity of an artist who worked across media while remaining attentive to a remarkably concentrated urban world. The centennial framework gives the publication a clear historical purpose: to reconsider Leiter in full rather than through a single, now-famous aspect of his practice.
