Saul Leiter - Inspirational street photographer (1923

Saul Leiter - Inspirational street photographer (1923 - 2013)

by Editor Colin Dixon
Edited and published by Yvette Depaepe, the 20st of September 2024

'November Passengers' by Nicoleta Gabor (Saul Leiter style)

Saul Leiter (1923 - 2013) was born in Pittsburg in 1923 and it seemed for a long time that he would go in a different direction than being an artist. Influenced by his father he studied to become a Rabbi but he left theology school and moved to New York at the age of 23 to become an artist. He actually got his first camera long before this time from his mother. At first he actually wanted to become a painter and when he came to Manhattan he enrolled in art school. His early paintings were full of colours and inspired by expressionism. In his classes he befriended Richard Pousette-Dart who was a painter, as well as William Eugene Smith, an American photojournalist. It was actually Smith who encouraged him to pursue photography.

I think this quote from him sums up his transition from Art to Photography
“Photography is about finding things, and painting is different—it’s about making something.”

His first images were of his friends and lovers and of himself with them and of course of the streets of New York

By the late 40’s Saul had begun to experiment in colour photography, sometimes using Kodachrome 35 mm film past its sell-by date to reduce costs. His main subjects were street scenes. Leiter made a huge and unique contribution to photography with a highly prolific period in New York City in the 1950s. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. His earliest photographs in black-and-white and especially colour show an extraordinary talent for the medium of photography.

He spent the majority of his career documenting the neighbourhood of Manhattan’s East Village and a lot of his greatest photographs were shot there in Manhattan. He certainly captures the feel and the look of the streets there in his local area in the 1950’s. His images take you back to a moment in time. He also shot commercially, and worked for fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazar. But it is his street work that for me makes him standout as one of the greats of photography. He liked to capture ordinary, everyday events, mostly taken during daily walks through his neighbourhood.

Also he loved rain and snow, and reflections - this allowed him to create painterly images. He was of course a painter first, and these elements helped him diffuse or confuse reality and draw your attention to the essential elements of the image. He enjoyed the play of light and colours to confuse the viewer.

It is his colour work that I find inspirational, his radically innovative compositions and a mastery of colour that permanently changed the history of photography. Saul Leiter sometimes defended the use of colour in fine-art photography, but he refused to analyse his own work.
“I don’t have a philosophy,” Leiter said: “I have a camera.”

His work has had a huge influential effect on so many photographers over the years and I am sure many on 1x. Here are a few examples I have found.