Bunkamura has been running an exhibition of New York artist Saul Leiter's work.  I've admired him since first seeing his stuff several years ago, sometime after Steidl's release of a monograph ("Early Color") in 2006.  Most of his now best known work was done in the 1950s and thereabouts, but went largely undiscovered for decades.  Leiter himself seems not to have minded this situation, as it allowed him to work on whatever satisfied him without distraction.  He passed away in 2013, and the attention for his work has continued.  The Bunkamura show is a major retrospective, including not only his photographs but also paintings, plus artifacts from his life and work.  I was greatly impressed by the crowds that had come, many of whom seemed not just casual viewers but were deeply and reverently looking at the photos, engaging with each other in serious comments about them while enjoying their whimsy.  There is a substantial and sophisticated audience here for this kind of aesthetic work, and I've long seen Japan as having a kind of visual superliteracy.

About the photographs, one thing that struck me was how Leiter took what I would have seen as troublesome impediments (posts, awnings, other people, etc.) and used these as structural elements in his photos.  I am continually lamenting how hard it is to get a clear shot of anything in the street here - with the sheer density there's always something in the way - but his work made me feel like a whiner.  No excuses; whatever is there, use it!  This reminded me somewhat of the way the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu often used frames within frames, relying on whatever was available in tight Japanese interior and exterior spaces, except Leiter's compositions often partially obscure subjects rather than just frame them.  At times he took this to the extreme - there was one shot, called, "Boy, 1952", which showed a small boy sitting on a wall.  A car antenna in the foreground occupies only about 1% of the horizontal frame, yet he's composed the photo so this antenna is in front of the boy's face.  It would have been easy to get a "clear" shot but he chose the opposite.

I also appreciate his keen eye for style and the interaction of fashion with the surrounding environment, reflected in the photos of a time when more people made more effort to dress well.