He is among the most influential visual artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Now, what has this to do with Saul Leiter?
A hand is a hand is a hand, or something like a hand, and so forth. The purpose of so much storage is, in part, in aid of preventing the very busy brain from having to do all that sorting and interpreting each and every time we see… say, a human hand: because our brains have filed away an incalculable number of visual cues that we define as “hand,” to know the tip of one finger is to know the rest of the assumed whole, no matter in what size, shape, color, or permutation. This morgue of literally countless images-and more important, bits of images-from every conceivable axial point of reference serves as a vocabulary. Assistant and friend Margit Erb (a producer here) comes in from time to time to keep him focused.Every single bit of visual stimulus that comes to the human brain via the visual cortex must be interpreted, learned, and filed away for future reference. We watch the now-old man dig through rooms full of work few people have ever seen, reminiscing about the (recently deceased) love of his life and delivering the occasional bit of wisdom like, “the important thing in life is not what you get, but what you throw out.” He sometimes hesitates mid-utterance, as if unsure how seriously he wants to take this whole documentary thing: Speaking of nudes he shot of one woman, he says he “did some pictures of her that are slightly…they’re slightly…” before simply moving on to another photo. (Cue great shots of art-world types ranging from John Cage to Andy Warhol.) But here and in discussing his boyhood (Mom bought him his first camera Dad was an overserious Talmudic scholar), the recollections are more piecemeal than comprehensive. “A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person,” Leiter declares, recalling a New York City youth that found him rubbing elbows with the legends of Abstract Expressionism.
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