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(Fame!)

I'm gonna live forever

Baby, remember my name

Donna Summer, Tobias Gad

I think I’d have liked to have met Saul Leiter. All that I have heard him say ​about himself or his photography, or what I have read of him by others, paints ​a vivid picture of someone who enjoyed a great life by simply playing by their ​own rules and doing what they enjoyed without any need for external ​validation, remaining ‘unfamous’ for almost his entire life. His first colour ​monograph ‘Saul Leiter: Early Color’ that brought him to global prominence, ​wasn’t published until 2004, when he was 82 years old and just 9 years before ​his death. He was an artist with an extraordinary, innate talent for painting and ​photographing beauty, and he left an immense archive including tens of ​thousands of photographs with some of the best examples of street ​photography that still resonate and inspire today. There’s been a lot written ​about Leiter, several well-produced photobooks, and a wonderfully warm, ​intimate documentary by Tomas Leach, in 2013 entitled ‘Saul Leiter: In no ​great hurry’ which shows Leiter, in his 80s, talking about his life and ​motivations whilst clearing through boxfuls of memories in the small ​apartment in New York’s East Village where he lived for most of his life. In all ​he comes across as a charismatic, funny, self-effacing, and exceptional human ​being and I think you’d have liked to have met him, too.

“I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures.” Saul Leiter

The exhibition at MK gallery, entitled ‘ Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World’, ​curated, with exquisite balance, by Anne Morin, displays 171 photographs ​(mainly of his Lower Manhattan, East Village neighbourhood in the 1950s and ​‘60s) and 40 paintings as well as some captivating painted-over photographs ​from Leiter’s extensive collection of 15,000 black and white prints, over ​40,000 colour slides and more than 4000 (mostly watercolour) paintings. ​Also included are several erotic portraits of Soames Bantry, his long-time ​partner and former model that - in one photobook of his containing examples ​of them - received an NSFW warning in an online review which (after I looked ​it up), made me smile. It’s a beautiful show, deliberately arranged without ​chronology, and juxtaposes his black and white and colour photographs with ​his paintings to show how he was really a painter who took photographs or as ​Jonathan Jones put it ‘… an impressionist with a camera’. Morin goes further ​and describes Leiter as a poet. Like Moriyama in Japan, Leiter eschewed the ​big stories, the big vistas, the flamboyant gestures, and Morin describes his ​work as ‘a celebration of humility’ by someone who wished just to ‘make ​visible the extraordinary of the ordinary’. His images are soft, warm, ​luminous, and almost always ‘quiet’; you’d never know you were in the middle ​of New York except for the occasional detail. It’s “what (the city) hides, what ​can’t be seen, that he’s looking at” says Morin. People on the street, cars, ​traffic lights are pictured throughout the year, in all weathers, and often ​viewed from inside, through condensation or raindrops on glass, or from ​underneath or between barriers that could take up most of the frame.

“It isn’t always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing ​things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep ​taking pictures every second of your life.” Saul Leiter

Vertical compositions with the compressed (painterly) perspective of a ​telephoto lens are commonly used to produce collage-like, geometric ​arrangements with narrow depths of field, overlapping layers and a strong use ​of negative space. The colours red and yellow seem to make a seemingly ​disproportionate, but beautifully nuanced, appearance - as do umbrellas – lots ​of umbrellas. Sometimes the colour photographs with their large blocks of ​complementary and unsaturated, pastel colours appear, at first sight, to be ​simply abstract images, but then something distinctive – an ‘anchor’ (perhaps ​one of those umbrellas, a car, the silhouette of a person) - reveals itself and we ​then see what he saw through his eyes. He sought, found, and captured what ​Morin calls “the incisive moment” a phrase that wonderfully relates and ​differentiates Leiter’s legacy from that of the more well known, Henri-Cartier ​Bresson. Leiter simply calls them ‘… fragments of endless possibilities’ but ​what differentiates his work from that which we might capture easily on a ​camera phone is his eye for the detail and the fact that time has revealed his ​images to be works of art – not something many of us could believe of our own ​pictures.

“Sometimes I worked with a lens that I had when I might have preferred another lens. I think ​Picasso once said that he wanted to use green in a painting but since he didn’t have it he used red. ​Perfection is not something I admire. A touch of confusion is a desirable ingredient.” Saul Leiter

For most of his life, Leiter didn’t pay attention to ordering his work into anything that might have been considered ​a body of work; in other words, a career. He just did what he loved to do. He proudly states “I wasn’t ambitious or ​driven. … I don’t admire success the way some people do. I was fortunate to fulfil my ambition to be ​unsuccessful.” Luckily for us, though, he was unsuccessful in that ambition – at least for the last decade of his life ​and beyond.

“It’s quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ​ordinary places. One doesn’t have to be in some faraway dreamland in order to find ​beauty”. Saul Leiter

I certainly do not class myself as an artist, but like Saul Leiter, I enjoy taking ​photographs and drinking coffee and a great day, in my opinion, is one filled ​with both. I use Canva – the online template editor app - for arranging and ​posting these photoessays, but I don’t use or need all the add-ons of millions ​of images, thousands of templates, AI generated text etc, provided by the ​‘pro’ subscription version of the software and so just stick to using the free ​one and I’m very much enjoying its simplicity and cost. Consequently, I also ​don’t get the ‘analytics’ that come with the pro-version that would give me ​detailed numbers on how many (and - from what I think it says - even, what ​type of!) people are engaging with my ‘In my View’ site; which I think means ​that they have at least clicked to open it and then hung around a bit longer ​than required to just click away from it immediately. Consequently, I don’t ​know if I’m the only person who has ever read any of these articles or looked ​at any of the pictures? Only you would know if that were true! There’s no ​‘likes’, no subscriptions and no comments and so each photoessay is pretty ​much like one of those analogue, paper-based things you used to get from a ​bookshop or library, which, when you got to the end of it, you simply ​smiled/shrugged/cried or whatever and moved onto the next one without ​feeling the need to let total strangers know – anonymously - how you felt. ​Heady days indeed! Anyway, the point I am labouring is that being ​recognised for something you enjoy doing is nice, I guess, but not essential ​to ensure the doing of it, unless, perhaps, it has a monetary value.

“I am not immersed in self-admiration. When I am listening to Vivaldi or Japanese music or ​making spaghetti at three in the morning and realize that I don’t have the proper sauce for it, ​fame is of no use.” Saul Leiter

These photoessays have no monetary value; I enjoy attending the various ​events I describe, taking a number of images, putting those images together ​into a coherent set (if possible) and then thinking about what I felt before trying ​to write something that requires me to find out about things I don’t fully ​understand and, importantly, distracts and amuses me. I’m not convinced I’d ​get the same degree of distraction / amusement from filming myself putting ​together a chicken chow mein for Instagram, although, to be fair, I’ve never ​tried it. BUT people do – lots of people do. And those people get many ​thousands more likes, ‘followers’ and comments than I ever could and, I guess, ​it’s to become ‘known’ in a way that is possible now to anyone (with access to ​the internet) thanks to the impact and reach of social media. So, shouldn’t we ​all, including me, seek to be recognised and admired by millions of our fellow ​humans i.e. to be famous? Or perhaps, more realistically, to at least acquire ​prestige; that is, to achieve status by excelling in particular, valued domains ​leading to recognition within a smaller, more selective community. It’s certainly ​hard wired in us, as prestige would have enhanced your chances of finding a ​mate in your community and so would have ensured your genes being selected ​in a competitive environment.

According to Joseph Henrich and Francisco J Gil-White, writing in Evolution and Human Behavior (2001), “High ​status entails greater access to desirable things, that access typically is not actively resisted by inferiors. There ​will be occasional fights, but not typically. For status, properly speaking, we require a relatively stable ​acquiescence (begrudging or not) from the “have-nots”. This understanding is signaled in ethological behavior, ​such that higher status individuals — identified by the flow of benefits — are typically the receivers, rather than ​the givers, of deference displays.” Status gained through prestige in humans therefore differentiates through ​status gained through dominance in nonhumans as it derives often from “ … nonagonistic sources, in particular, ​from excellence in valued domains of activity, even without any credible claim to superior force.” In other words, ​a chicken chow mein, Tik Tok video’s not going to get a cat a date even if it’s got 30,000+ likes.

But perhaps fame’s not all that anymore even for us humans? Arthur Brooks in his ‘How to build a life’ column ​argues that wanting fame is like every other bad habit we might have retained from our evolutionary past where we ​want things – e.g. calories, lazing around - that are no longer what are good for us. So, what we want is not the same ​as what would make us feel better. In his words, “The right rule of thumb is to treat fame like a dangerous drug: ​Never seek it for its own sake, teach your kids to avoid it, and shun those who offer it.” But that’s a message that is ​going to be hard to popularise. For example, a U.S study in 2012 showed that for children aged between 10 and 12, ​‘fame’ was their biggest goal in life whilst a British study of schoolchildren in 2017 identified ‘YouTuber’ as the most ​popular choice of future career. Additionally, and by utilising that classic way of getting adults to reveal their own ​feelings, in a poll of U.S adults the vast majority were happy to say that other people believe that “a person is ​successful if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known” or, in other words, achieving fame and/or ​prestige is a sure-fire way to realise success and, with that, the many benefits that surely famous people must get ​that us, everyday people, simply don’t.

“I’ve never been overwhelmed with a desire to become famous. It’s not that I didn’t want to have ​my work appreciated, but for some reason — maybe it’s because my father disapproved of almost ​everything I did — in some secret place in my being was a desire to avoid success.” Saul Leiter

Life must therefore be a lot easier for a famous person, making fame appear ​very appealing. But, to cut to the chase, what fame is believed to provide is ​power, status and wealth and, much more interestingly, attention and love. We ​are social animals, and we need to be noticed, we need attention; we crave ​approval and fame is how we think we might achieve it. BUT, as Saul Leiter ​appreciated, fame doesn’t give you approval, it merely gets you attention and ​that is a long (long) way from the love or understanding that may have been ​sought. And that attention can be – and sadly often is – negative with ​anonymous strangers, the so-called ‘haters’ very happy to point out every ​failing they perceive the famous person to have – whether real or imagined. ​Given that Taylor Swift, with her 283 million followers on Instagram, and ​arguably the most famous pop star of the moment, felt compelled enough to ​write (and ironically gain more fame), ‘Shake it Off’ as a song about “having to ​deal with on everyday basis, just kind of how human beings treat each other”, ​and “… (how) I feel when I'm checking out at the grocery store and I read some ​crazy headlines about me" shows that fame does not make you immune to ​hurt and pain. Sure, the money helps (don’t forget: the only thing money can’t ​buy is … poverty), but it doesn’t prevent the hate which will, more likely, ​accentuate every fear or anxiety you already have about yourself.

So, whilst fame may appear to have benefits, is the attention of strangers better than the approval and love of ​friends and family? Both require work, so it's your choice whether you want the intrinsic rewards of love or the ​extrinsic rewards associated with fame and thus where you choose to focus your efforts in the one life you have. If ​it’s the former you think you want but you are aware that you crave the latter, Arthur Brooks offers three pieces of ​advice:

1. Interrogate your motivations when seeking fame – especially from strangers. Ask yourself what you hope to ​achieve with it. Is it truly to amuse or inform others, or share something uplifting? Or are you hoping to inspire a ​bit of invidious comparison?

2. If your motives are more fame-based than you’d like to admit, consider the value that following through would ​bring relative to the cost. That is, the benefit of that small, pleasurable hit of dopamine as you press send versus ​the cost in the reality of how people will actually see your post (and you).

3. Ask yourself whether you really want to base some part of your happiness on the judgment of others, including ​and especially strangers. To seek fame per se—to attract attention to yourself as opposed to your work—is to ​subject yourself emotionally to that scrutiny, which will inevitably end in disaster for your self-esteem.

I’d summarise all of that simply as

‘Be more Saul’.

So, as I prepare to press the Canva ​‘Publish’ button on this photoessay, I’m ​frantically checking through those three ​pieces of advice and hoping fervently, that ​my motivations are solely intrinsic whilst ​at the same time juggling with a video ​camera, some bits of chicken, soggy ​noodles and some soy sauce. I’ve got this …

“In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ​ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it… Maybe I ​was irresponsible. But part of the pleasure of being alive is that I didn’t take everything as ​seriously as one should.” Saul Leiter

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Be more Saul.

In this collection of photoessays, I aim to capture certain ​aspects of modern culture as seen through a lens shaped ​either by Apple, Fujifilm and/or my own perspective.

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