Saul Leiter review – glorious survey of an impressionist with a camera

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Leiter looked at the street life of Manhattan and beyond with precise ideals of beauty and an infectious joy

We call photography “art” with casual unthinkingness now. In Florence there’s a Selfie Museum just round the corner from the museum containing Michelangelo’s David. Can we really describe both as art? But maybe it’s the wrong question. As EH Gombrich put it: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” And the exquisite exhibition at MK Gallery of Saul Leiter’s pictures of postwar New York is a masterclass in demonstrating how a photographer can be an artist.

The artist, not the lens, took his pictures. They are no more spontaneous than a Constable landscape – even though both appear unplanned and immediate. But like a plein air painter who’s put in years of looking at landscape masterpieces before taking brushes out into the fields, Leiter looked at the street life of Manhattan with an eye shaped by artistic knowledge and precise ideals of beauty.

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