In My Room brings together Saul Leiter’s black-and-white photographs of nude women made from 1946 through roughly the next two decades. The subjects were women he knew, photographed within private interiors and, frequently, in the natural light of his East Village studio. Rather than separating the figure from its surroundings, Leiter allows rooms, furnishings, shadows, and intervening surfaces to remain active within the image.

The photographs are intimate without becoming fully explanatory. Bodies may be partially concealed, absorbed by darkness, or reorganized through framing into passages of tone and shape. This balance between recognition and abstraction reflects Leiter’s parallel identity as a painter. The acknowledged influence of Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse can be felt not as quotation, but in his attention to enclosed space, patterned surfaces, and the quiet tension between figure and interior.

The relationship between photographer and subject is central. These are not presented as detached studio exercises: their informal character arises from familiarity and collaboration, while the domestic setting preserves a sense of privacy. Natural light softens the descriptive authority of the camera, leaving gestures and expressions open-ended. The result is a body of work that remains personal yet resistant to biography, inviting close looking without resolving its atmosphere of reserve.

Leiter considered making a book of his nudes in the 1970s, but the project was not completed during his lifetime. Published by Steidl in 2017, this 192-page volume gives sustained form to photographs recovered from his extensive archive. For collectors, its importance rests in that conjunction of history and form: it documents a long-developed, privately held strand of Leiter’s practice while clarifying how decisively his photographic language was shaped by painting, intimacy, and the spatial conditions of the room.