Special Talk - NEW YORK THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE: Paul Auster and Saul Leiter

Wednesday, May 7, 6 PM SEIZAN Gallery, 525 W 26th St, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10001

Featuring: Margit Erb – Director, Saul Leiter Foundation Michael Parillo – Director, Saul Leiter Foundation Siri Hustvedt – Writer Sam Messer – Artist Motoyuki Shibata – English-to-Japanese Translator, Writer Pauline Vermare – Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum

Photo: (Auster, left) ©Spencer Ostrander, (Leiter, right) Robert Freson, Saul Leiter, c. 1965 SEIZAN Gallery invites you to a special evening honoring Paul Auster and Saul Leiter—two artists who reimagined New York City in deeply personal ways through their work.

In commemoration of the first anniversary of Paul Auster’s passing, we welcome a distinguished group of speakers—close collaborators and longtime friends of the acclaimed writer: Siri Hustvedt, author and Auster’s partner; Sam Messer, celebrated painter and longtime friend; and Motoyuki Shibata, renowned translator of most of Auster’s titles in Japanese. 

Though Paul Auster and Saul Leiter never met—Leiter having been born 25 years earlier—their words and images seem to echo each other. They were combined in the publication It Don’t Mean a Thing (The Gould Collection) in 2017. Both artists have built enduring communities of admirers, not only in New York but around the world, particularly in France and in Japan. Joining the conversation are Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, along with Pauline Vermare of the Brooklyn Museum. Together, they will discuss the connections and resonances between the writer and the photographer.

The talk will be accompanied by an exhibition featuring selected prints by Saul Leiter, paintings and prints by Sam Messer, and portraits of Auster by the photographer Spencer Ostrander, Auster son-in-law. Together, they had collaborated on an acclaimed publication focusing on gun violence in America: Bloodbath Nation. (Grove Press, 2023). The exhibition will be on view from May 7 through May 17.

Copies of The Gould Collection Volume 2: Saul Leiter & Paul Auster (reprint edition) and recent issues of MONKEY New Writing from Japan will be available for purchase at the event.

Paul Auster was born in Newark in 1947.  Working mainly as a poet during his youth, he turned to prose with The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982. He gained renown as a novelist with The New York Trilogy—three novellas published in 1985–86.  He continued to publish novels and books of essays for four decades, establishing himself as one of the most important and beloved contemporary American writers.  His novels include The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), 4 3 2 1 (2017), and Baumgartner (2023).  Among his books of nonfiction is Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021).  Auster died in 2024.  His books have been translated into more than forty languages, and his work is treasured all over Europe as well as in Japan.

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. He began painting and taking photographs as a teenager and enjoyed some early success in exhibiting his paintings. When he moved to New York City in 1946, he focused on photography as a way to earn a living, while continuing to paint. In 1957 Leiter started a fashion career in magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, shooting street photographs all the while, mostly in his downtown Manhattan neighborhood. In 2006 his first monograph, Early Color (Steidl), was published, revealing the artist as a master of color photography from as far back as the late 1940s. Leiter died in 2013 as his popularity was growing, and since then the Saul Leiter Foundation has arranged museum exhibitions and book releases worldwide.