May 17, 2021 Issue

Johanna Fateman’s “Goings On About Town” note on the Jewish Museum exhibition “Modern Look,” in this week’s issue, describes a Saul Leiter photo, titled “Canopy,” as an “Ab Ex-inflected scene of a snowy New York City street almost entirely obscured by a jagged field of black.” Mm, I’d like to see that. I searched for it online at the Jewish Museum, but no luck. I found it at The Art Institute of Chicago.

It is an inspired shot. That “jagged field of black” is actually the edge of an awning that Leiter was standing under when he took the photo. 

Saul Leiter, Canopy (1958)

Leiter was one of the great flâneurs of the twentieth century. He roamed New York streets hunting for images. He often found them in the most unlikely places, like under that awning. Michael Greenberg, in his excellent “Catching Hold of the Devious City” (The New York Review of Books, July 9, 2015), says of Leiter,

Leiter photographed through windows, through rain, under awnings and canopies, and through the spaces between construction site boards to create (or more accurately, to show) a mystery of activity and simultaneous perspectives. Often his subject seems to be color and light itself. His pictures can be looked at as abstractions, but they never deviate too far from what is recognizably real. A blooming red umbrella materializes behind a yellow taxi in a storm; three Rothko-like panels of darkness frame an ordinary street scene with window-shoppers, walking pedestrians, and a passing white car. They seem to be instructing us in a new way to take in the city.