He was given his first camera, a Detrola, by his mother in 1935, the year before the first Kodachrome film for 35mm cameras was produced by Kodak. Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.
Leiter's street photographs, as unhurried as those of Helen Levitt, are more complex and impressionistic. The photographs he created are, in their softly lit, neon poetry, a direct contrast to the clamour and movement of William Klein's New York images or the out-of-kilter kinetic energy that characterises Gary Winogrand's street photographs.īrigitte Woischnik, who co-edited the catalogue for a Leiter retrospective in Hamburg last year, dubbed him "the Promenader", which deftly suggests his relaxed but utterly attentive approach to street photography, a term that now seems too reductive when applied to his work. In the received history of American photography, it was Stephen Shore and William Eggleston who were the trailblazers of colour photography in the early 1970s, but Leiter was using Kodachrome colour slide film at least two decades earlier. That greatness, though, was evident in his often painterly images, which evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour, at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. "I'm not carried away by the greatness of Mr Leiter." "What makes anyone think that I'm any good?" he asked Tomas Leach, who directed the feature-length documentary In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter (2012). Even then, Leiter was reluctant to accept the belated praise heaped upon him. A pioneer of colour, he remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s. Saul Leiter, who has died aged 89, was one of the quiet men of American photography.
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