Yes it is and Leiter is my man...
Peter
Yep, mine too. If you don't have them, the twin black/white books (by Steidl) are worth buying. They reveal
the another side to his world and work. They could have been slightly larger, the books, but then I don't think Leiter was ever into making anything bigger than what he could get onto full plate or 8x10 paper. He seems never to have had any spare money for most of his life, which accounted for a lot of the colour effects from out-of-date and probably badly stored colour films. I have some beautifully conserved film in the freezer, much of it Kodachrome, so my stash is effectively as useless at the moment as his might have been, only in different ways.
I wonder if he was ever really aware of what a seminal figure and influence he truly was? In some interviews he comes over as very modest, but could he have been, considering the acclaim that came his way, nor forgetting the couple of decades during which he worked for the best magazines in the world?
I guess that doing interviews on a stage when you are quite aged must be both wearying and boring when you find yourself having to do so many in a brief few years. That tiredness can easily be misinterpreted for something else.
:-)
