Saul Leiter @ Foam, Amsterdam - Retrospective Exhibition "An Unfinished World"

Saul Leiter

An Unfinished World

Foam, Amsterdam

Until 20 April 2025

SAUL LEITER

Harlem, 1960

© Saul Leiter / Saul Leiter Foundation

“Photographs are often treated as important moments, but really they are fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.”  – Saul Leiter  

Foam presents a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist SAUL LEITER (1923–2013). Saul Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States, and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions.

For nearly sixty years, Saul Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Saul Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries. 

By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Saul Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography. 

Saul Leiter was a self-taught photographer whose strong sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student. He maintained his experimental and spontaneous approach throughout his career, which is evident in both his street photography and fashion work. 

Upon his death in 2013, Saul Leiter left behind a remarkable collection of approximately 15,000 black-and-white prints, at least 40,000 colour slides, a similar number of black-and-white negatives and over 4000 paintings, only a handful of which have been seen publicly. The exhibition An Unfinished World offers visitors the chance to admire the endless poetry of Saul Leiter’s artistic practice through his paintings, photography and unique view on the world around him. 

SAUL LEITER (1923–2013) began painting and photographing in his teenage years, gaining an early recognition for his paintings. After moving to New York in 1946, he turned to photography as a profession while continuing to paint. His abstract forms and groundbreaking compositions possess a painterly quality that distinguishes them from the works of other photographers of that era. His work significantly contributed to the emergence of what is now known as the New York School of photography. 

In 1957, he began working for major publications like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, balancing his commercial success with his personal passion for street photography in his Manhattan neighborhood. Saul Leiter's groundbreaking work in colour photography gained widespread acclaim with the release of his first book, Early Color (2006). By the time of his death in 2013, Saul Leiter had achieved international recognition, with his work featured in numerous museum exhibitions and publications worldwide. 

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Les Rencontres d'Arles and diChroma photography and curated by Anne Morin.

FOAM - AMSTERDAM

Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam

www.foam.org

Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World

FOAM, Amsterdam

24 January 2025 – 20 April 2025

Erwin Blumenfeld in Color @ Foam, Amsterdam - His New York Years

Erwin Blumenfeld in Color
His New York Years
Foam, Amsterdam
15 February - 14 April 2019

The German fashion photographer Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) is one of the most celebrated and best-paid fashion photographers of his time. He was mostly known for his oeuvre in black and white, but the exhibition in Foam focuses on the color photography he made in his period in New York (1941-1960) which brought him worldwide recognition. The unique style of self-taught Erwin Blumenfeld has been a major influence on fashion photography in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Foam displays some eighty color prints, a number of vintages from his periods in Amsterdam and Paris in black and white, original magazines and some of his experimental fashion films.

Erwin Blumenfeld was born in Germany. In 1918 he moved, then a painter and enthusiastic photographer, to the Netherlands to marry the Dutch Lena Citroen, the niece of his good friend and artist Paul Citroen. In Amsterdam he opens Fox Leather Goods, a leather goods store on one of the main shopping streets in the city center. When he discovers a dark room in the shop, he turns back to photography and starts experimenting. He exhibits the portraits he shoots in the window of his shop. The photos quickly become more popular than his leather goods. In 1936 his business goes bankrupt and he decides to venture to in Paris, the city of fashion and arts. In the first years of his career in fashion photography in Paris, he only works in black and white. The female nude is his favorite subject, as for many photographers at the time. The female body forms the core of his experiments with photographic techniques such as double exposure, distortion, solarization and chemical effects. But from the moment color photography is possible, he transforms his original compositions in black and white into color. With a kaleidoscopic oeuvre as a result.

In 1941 Erwin Blumenfeld fled the occupation in France with his family. The move also leads to a transition from the black and white photographs he made in Paris to an oeuvre in color. Arriving in New York, he immediately starts working for Harper's Bazaar, after which he would work with Vogue for a long time from 1944 onwards. His unique aesthetic of forms and colors that he created after his arrival in New York makes him one of the most original fashion photographers of his time. Despite the frivolity of fashion, he distinguishes himself by the surreal way he depicts the hidden nature of his subjects; the goal of his quest is not realism, but the mystery of reality. He understood that it was not about showing beautiful clothes, but about creating iconic images. He described his practice as 'smuggling art' into the territory of fashion. In addition to the experimental photographic techniques that he applied, he was also one of the first to think beyond the frame of the photo and make fashion films. His work became known worldwide, partly because of the many innovative covers he shot, of unprecedented graphical quality, in which his photographs were shown to their full potential.

FOAM
Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam
www.foam.org

André Kertész @ Foam, Amsterdam : Mirroring Life

André Kertész – Mirroring Life
Foam, Amsterdam
Through 10 January 2018

ANDRE KERTESZ (1894-1985) is renowned for the exceptional contribution he made to the visual language of 20th-century photography with his poetic work. Foam presents a retrospective of his oeuvre, examining his early work created in his homeland of Hungary, his time in Paris – where between 1925 and 1936, he was a leading figure in avant-garde photography – through to New York, where he lived for nearly fifty years. In an interview, André Kertész once said: “Everybody can look, but they don’t necessarily see.” Mirroring Life explores his creative capacity, using unusual compositions to create a new perspective of reality. It is an homage to the photographer whom Henri Cartier-Bresson viewed as one of his mentors.

At a very early age André Kertész was drawn to the photography he saw in illustrated magazines as a child. In 1912, after his study in Business Administration, he bought his first camera from his first pay cheque. His hobby quickly gained the upper hand. He photographed farmers, gypsies and landscapes and made playful compositions featuring his brothers as extras. Even when he was called into the army in 1914, he took his camera with him. However, the photographs he took during the war sooner resemble a personal diary than a news report. In 1925, he left Hungary and moved to Paris. More than other photographers of his time, such as Jacques Henri Lartigue, who focused on his own flamboyant lifestyle, or Brassaï, who voyeuristically captured the cabarets and forbidden temptations of nocturnal Paris, André Kertész worked as an anonymous flâneur. He observed the city, taking in its cafés and parks, or simply looked out of the window of his flat. He photographed his artist friends, shop windows, posters and symbols on the street, shadows cast by trees, passers-by, children playing, a pair of glasses laying on a table – simple things, but always captured from a unique perspective, through which he found poetry in the mundane.

In 1936, André Kertész traded Paris in for New York, where he went to work for the Keystone agency. He intended to return to Paris after a year or two, and left the majority of his negatives in France. However, due to a lack of income and World War II returning was no longer an option. For many years, his work was not valued in New York. That was until 1964, when John Szarkowski, the new curator of photography at MoMA, rediscovered his work and organised a solo exhibition to showcase it. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue containing 64 photographs. In 1963, Kertész also retrieved the negatives that he had left in France in 1936, significantly enlarging his depleted oeuvre.

In 1984, a year before his death, André Kertész donated 100,000 negatives and 15,000 colour slides, letters and other personal documents to the French Ministry of Culture. In Foam a large selection of around 200 of these photographs can be seen. The black-and-white modern silver gelatine prints featured in the exhibition originate from the negatives from this collection. A selection of unique historical documents like illustrated magazines, photobooks, contact sheets and dummies was also added to the exhibition.

Mirroring Life features more than 200 photographs, offering a chronological overview of Kertész’ 70-year artistic oeuvre: the Hungarian period (1912-1925), his time in Paris (1925-1936), the American period in New York (1936-1985) and the international period that followed the reassessment of his work. It was in this final period that he rediscovered his artistic soul, departing on numerous trips that allowed his photography to flourish anew. André Kertész’ best-known and most respected work is shot in black-and-white, but the exhibition also features a small selection of colour photographs. These works have been rarely published or displayed, hence they have remained a less well-known element of his oeuvre. Despite a variety of periods and circumstances, themes and styles, Mirroring Life reveals the consistent poetic approach in the work of André Kertész.

This exhibition is organised with Jeu de Paume, Paris, in collaboration with La Médiathèque d l’architecture et du patrimoine, ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – France and diChroma photography.

Foam
Keizersgracht 609 - 1017 DS Amsterdam
www.foam.org

Francesca Woodman @ Foam, Amsterdam - On Being an Angel

Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel

Foam, Amsterdam

18 December 2015 – 9 March 2016

Foam presents an overview of the exceptional and intense work of an American photographer who died young, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Woodman used photography as an extremely personal means of expression, as if wearing her skin inside out, making herself the only subject of her work. After her untimely death her photographs were shown in a number of major international exhibitions and they have inspired artists all over the world.

Before committing suicide at the age of twenty-two, Francesca Woodman explored themes such as gender, representation, sexuality and corporality. Her oeuvre consists of a large number of self-portraits. A striking aspect of her work is that she is either explicitly naked, or in contrast, attempts to hide her body: squeezed into a cupboard, behind the wallpaper, wrapped in plastic or material, or in a shroud of movement. She photographs herself in interiors punctuated by evidence of decay. Even when other people feature in Francesca Woodman’s photographs, they function purely as a stand-in for the artist. Francesca Woodman’s photographs showcase a range of symbolist and surrealist influences, and in many cases they evoke oppressive feelings.

Francesca Woodman grew up in a family of artists and began taking photographs in her teens. From 1975 to 1978 she studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her oeuvre is usually divided into periods: the early work, her work as a student in Providence, work made in Italy (1977-1978) or at the MacDowell Colony and, finally, the work she produced from 1979 in New York until her death in 1981. She left several hundred gelatine silver prints, although she also experimented with other techniques.

The first major travelling exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s work took place in 1986, some years after her death. Her first European exhibitions were held in the early 1990s. The Kunsthal in Rotterdam was the first to present her work in the Netherlands, in 1998.

The exhibition Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel has been organized by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in collaboration with the Estate of Francesca Woodman and consists of 102 photographs, mainly gelatine silver prints but including several large-format diazotype prints and six short videos.

FOAM

Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam 

www.foam.org