At the Reggia di Monza the first major Italian retrospective dedicated to Saul Leiter

From May 1 to July 27, 2025, the Belvedere at the Reggia di Monza hosts Saul Leiter. A Window Dotted with Raindrops, the first major Italian retrospective dedicated to Saul Leiter. Curated by Anne Morin and organized by Vertigo Syndrome, in collaboration with diChroma photography, the exhibition will bring together a wide selection of the artist’s work, including 126 black-and-white photographs, 40 color shots, 42 paintings and rare archival materials, including original period magazines and a film document.

The display, which includes both vintage and modern prints, presents Leiter’s early photographic experiments alongside his celebrated fashion work, produced for publications such as Harper’s Bazaar. Through this exhibition, the characteristics that set him apart from his contemporaries and the influence his work continues to exert on modern photography emerge. While his colleagues immortalized the grandeur and dynamism of New York City, Leiter took a radically different approach. In his shots, everyday moments become visual poems, intimate scenes in which steam rising from manhole covers, umbrellas in the rain, and reflections in storefronts are transformed into fragments of fairy-tale realism. People, objects, streets, rain and snow compose images that are more peeked at than observed; “photographic haikus,” intimate glimpses of life that blend reality and abstraction.

He embraced visual obstruction as an integral part of his style, choosing to photograph through tarnished glass, surfaces filtered by fabrics or unfavorable weather conditions, elements that for others represented obstacles but which he transformed into creative resources. His images, characterized by a layering of planes and details, often evoke painting rather than photography.

His pioneering use of color, begun as early as 1948, predated the legitimization of color photography as an art form by decades. While most photographers of the time considered it a commercial medium or lacking in sophistication, Leiter explored it with painterly sensibility, harnessing its expressive potential to transform the streets of New York into abstract compositions, rich in vibrant hues.

This innovative vision made him a distinctive author compared to his New York School contemporaries and caught the attention of the fashion industry. Beginning in the 1950s, Leiter collaborated with prestigious magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, then expanded his work to international titles including Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen and Nova over the next two decades.

Between painting and photography: the dual soul of Saul Leiter

The exhibition highlights the relationship between Leiter’s two artistic souls, the pictorial and the photographic, emphasizing how his training in painting profoundly influenced his approach to color photography. Indeed, each shot seems to be conceived as a canvas, with unprecedented chromatic and compositional refinement.

“I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera,” Leiter said. “I look through the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the smallest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of infinite possibilities.” This unpretentious approach allowed him to capture moments of grace in everyday life that other photographers, weighed down by art theory, often missed. His work suggests that beauty exists not in the big moments, but in the quiet intervals of everyday life.

Shy and far removed from the dynamics of celebrity, Leiter has always maintained a confidential relationship with his artistic output. Although he has published numerous photographic volumes and participated in major monographic exhibitions in the United States and Europe, he has made only a portion of his work public, leaving most of his shots in negative, as if to protect the more intimate and authentic dimension of his art.

In 2018, five years after his passing, a little-known body of work was discovered: a series of black-and-white nudes, made in the late 1940s and early 1960s, the result of an artistic dialogue between Leiter and the women in his life.

“Leiter enjoyed what he saw. He was not interested in the hegemonic character of New York or its monstrous modernity,” explained curator Anne Morin. “He invented optical games, interweaving shapes and planes that conceal and reveal what lies in the intervals, in the vicinity, in the invisible margins.” “Leiter’s images last as long as the blink of an eye, positioned on the edge of something. They are snapshots, short, fragmented forms, like annotations, statements of reality, made with a mastery and metrics reminiscent of haiku: Leiter’s gesture is that of a calligrapher when he photographs fast, precise, unapologetically.”

Essential Biography.

The son of a famous rabbi, Saul Leiter rejected the theological path his father would have wanted for him, moving to New York in 1946 to pursue painting. Introduced to the art world in New York by colleagues such as Richard Pousette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith, Leiter continued the photographic experiments he had begun as a teenager, in black and white and color, often using 35 mm Kodachrome film and portraying his close circle of friends and street scenes around his home. After a successful stint in fashion photography for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Leiter remained in the shadows for two decades. The publication in 2006 of the monograph Early Color marked an international rediscovery of his work, confirming his pioneering role in the history of color photography.

His works are now in the collections of the most prestigious international museums, from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Victoria and Albert Museum, testifying to the enduring importance of his artistic contribution.

Saul Leiter died on November 26, 2013 at his home in New York’s East Village, leaving behind an immense archive of his artistic work. In the New York Times obituary, Margalit Fox wrote, “Of the tens of thousands of images he took-many now considered among the best examples of street photography in the world-most remain unprinted.”

The Saul Leiter Foundation, founded in 2014, preserves Leiter’s vast archive of photographs, paintings and personal objects, cultivating his legacy through books, exhibitions and educational activities. After celebrating the 100th anniversary of Leiter’s birth in 2023 with monographs The Unseen Saul Le iter and Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, the foundation continues to discover and share the multitude of works Leiter left behind.

At the Reggia di Monza the first major Italian retrospective dedicated to Saul Leiter

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.