The man is to Modern Art what the printing press was to civilization. However, in the case of Leiter, that contribution is nothing short of mammoth. In short: to see better is to see more, and more deeply and more appreciatively, more completely-this is but one more contribution of the artist to the lives of others. And what Leiter, seminal photographer and sometimes painter, has in common with all artists is his gift for helping the human brain learn to see in vastly different ways and expand its prodigious visual vocabulary to help it gain and master an acuity with form that heightens our perceptions of motion, color, deep space, negative space, positive space the sharp, the obscure, the soft, the distinct and indistinct the representational and the abstract, and the abstract that turns out isn’t really abstract after all, at least, not any more than a single puzzle piece is when compared to a nut without a bolt. He is among the most influential visual artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Now, what has this to do with Saul Leiter? A hand is a hand is a hand, or something like a hand, and so forth. The purpose of so much storage is, in part, in aid of preventing the very busy brain from having to do all that sorting and interpreting each and every time we see… say, a human hand: because our brains have filed away an incalculable number of visual cues that we define as “hand,” to know the tip of one finger is to know the rest of the assumed whole, no matter in what size, shape, color, or permutation. This morgue of literally countless images-and more important, bits of images-from every conceivable axial point of reference serves as a vocabulary. Every single bit of visual stimulus that comes to the human brain via the visual cortex must be interpreted, learned, and filed away for future reference.

In no great hurry