A photographer's gift to the viewer is sometimes beauty in the overlooked ordinary - Saul Leiter

Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter, who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s. This collection reveals the secrets of his appeal, from his life philosophy and lyricism to masterful colours and compositions. Some 200 works including early street photographs, images for advertising, nudes and paintings cover Leiter s career from the 1940s onwards, accompanied by quotations from the artist himself that express his singular world view.

These previously unpublished images of New York's waterfront are presented here as part of a unique editorial project: the iconographic perspective is analysed and discussed in Pauline Vermare’s interview with Sophie Fenwick, and finds further literary development in the photographer’s poetry, on which she started working during the pandemic and is used here to accompany the visual narrative.      The language of photography is used here — in a series of black and white and colour shots — to retrace the memory of a transformation and to express the urgency of documentation that in these pages evolves from personal to universal. The invitation to travel voiced by Fenwick is visual poetry articulated in a series of pictures, each of which possesses the potential to become a true icon. Text in English and French.

Public, Private, Secret explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves. Consciously framed by our present era, this collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behavior and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional delineations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression; in fact, they multiply and expand the number of potential selves in the contemporary image-centric world. The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. In so doing, they anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self- representation.