Women

Women collects nude and intimate portraits Saul Leiter made of women in his life across two decades, photographs that stayed in his East Village apartment until they surfaced after his death.

Published by the Japanese label Space Shower Books in 2018, the 160-page hardcover reproduces images taken between the late 1940s and late 1960s in the homes and private spaces Leiter shared with his subjects, scanned from his original silver prints, alongside a small number of his painted nudes. An eight-page essay by Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, printed in Japanese and English, accompanies the plates, and the edition carries the obi band and reference paper typical of Japanese photobook production.

Leiter (1923–2013) spent decades photographing New York in color for magazines while working largely unrecognized as a fine artist until a wave of late-career attention beginning in the early 2000s. Women was published the same year as the related Steidl title In My Room, both drawn from the archive of nudes Leiter kept private, and both realizing a book of nude studies he had first planned, but never completed, in the 1970s.