Halloween, c. 1952
Vintage gelatin silver print
13 × 8 ¾ in.
Signed in pencil verso
December 1, 2025
Looking at this image of a young girl, who appears cocksure and streetwise beyond her years, it's hard to imagine her living anywhere besides New York City. Saul Leiter embraced the city as his adopted home and lifelong artistic muse, and the moxie in the girl's body language and her ragamuffin clothes go a long way towards summing up why Leiter found the city's streetlife to be such a fertile subject.
Saul Leiter first came to prominence via his color photography, which frequently appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in the 1960s. His mid-century work in black and white received broader recognition in the 1990s, when the curator Jane Livingston included Leiter in her influential book The New York School: Photographs 1936–1963. Livingston placed Leiter’s work in the context of a loosely defined group of photographers who embraced a tough yet humanist ethos and took life in New York City as their subject.
