Aother great Christmas gift was the catalogue for the upcoming Saul Leiter show at the House of Photography, Hamburg which runs from 3rd February till 15th April 2012. If you don't know Leiter's work then get yourself a copy of this - as well as his only other book, 'Early Color', which is edited by art/photo historian Martin Harrison and published by Steidl. What I love about the catalogue is the broad range of work on show: fashion images from late Fifties/early Sixties Harper's Bazaar, early black and white photos, his personal colour 'street photographs' and many of his paintings - in the early days he had shown alongside de Kooning, but his work never caught on commercially - as well as a homage to Soames Bantry, his muse and partner. Interestingly, there are some images of Soames from a fashion story shot in Ireland for Nova magazine circa 1967. Although there was a show in 1996 of the early colour street photos at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, Leiter remained virtually unknown. And his colour images were, for the most part, looked down upon - it took near on ten years to find a publisher for his work. It's hard to believe that in the mid-Nineties "the photography world still looked down on color as a commercial device - slick and superficial". How the art world has changed! As Martin Harrison writes in the introduction to 'Early Color': "The evocative, painterly images on these pages vividly demonstrate that in the second half of the twentieth-century Saul Leiter's photographic language of fragmentation and contingency was extending the boundaries of the medium". Definitely worth checking the show when it opens in February: Click Here