There is a “mono no aware” beauty to these photographs, in the color work especially-an acute awareness of the beauty of the transient, of the ephemeral, which might explain, in part, their magical and poetic essence. Indeed, I’ve always felt a closeness to Japan in Saul’s work: the photographs in the snow the women under their umbrellas the improbable perspectives and revolutionary compositions reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks, ukiyo-e and the presence of the seasons and the verticality of the compositions evoking Japanese scroll paintings, kakejiku. Over the past years, the neighborhood has become strikingly Japanese, filled with izakayas, sobayas, ramen restaurants, and Japanese specialty supermarkets. Saul Leiter spent over sixty years of his life and took most of his photographs in New York City’s East Village, near Saint Marks Place. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I open a book by Matisse, Cézanne, or Sôtatsu…” -Saul Leiter The first Japanese exhibition of the American photographer Saul Leiter is on view at the Bunkamura Museum in Tokyo, featuring some little-known images.
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