Saul Leiter lived in an apartment on a quiet street in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood that evolved, during the six decades he lived there, nearly as much as Leiter himself. An undervalued photographer for most of his life, Leiter quietly amassed a body of work that has only recently begun receiving the credit it deserves. Since his death, last fall,the apartment has become Leiter’s de facto archive; Margit Erb, his gallery representative, and Anders Goldfarb, his long-time assistant, have spent months organizing the boxes of prints, negatives, portfolios, and books that he left haphazardly piled throughout the space.
The apartment today is far more organized than it was when Leiter died, but evidence of his life is everywhere. A high-backed wooden chair, where he painted and drank coffee, sits in a corner of a large room lit by a wall of windows. Old saucers that he used as palettes are stacked on the window ledge above a quiet courtyard. Figurative paintings by Soames Bantry, Leiter’s partner, hang alongside his own abstract watercolors. Primitive trinkets and vintage toys, including a Mickey Mouse doll, sit on the mantle; canvases of folk and Japanese art lean against the walls.
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