![]() ![]() Leiter takes sly delight in subverting the viewer’s preconceptions, or rerouting them in unexpected directions: a 1952 photograph of Marcel Duchamp is taken through what appears to be the plate glass of a cafe window, the master hunched over a table, offering nothing more than the back of his coal-black greatcoat and the edge of a hatbrim. The earliest pictures were black and white: candid, quietly observed portraits of family, friends and fellow artists, often illuminated by gauzy natural light, with an offbeat compositional sense. The overwhelming majority of his photographs document a mere handful of blocks. An apartment in the dilapidated Lower East Side became his home and imaginative locus over the next 60-odd years, only rarely did he venture out of the city. He eventually dropped out of rabbinical school, and, at the age of 23, boarded a bus for New York, intending to focus on becoming a painter. But when his mother gave him a Detrola at the age of 12 – “I can’t remember why,” Leiter later shrugged, “I thought I’d like a camera” – a different course was set. Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, he grew up in an stringently Jewish household, and was expected to follow his father, a towering figure in Talmudic scholarship, into what amounted to the family business. ![]() One of the numerous puzzles about Leiter is the fact that, until recent years, few people had even heard his name. ![]()
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