And the figures in his pictures are often seen only in part: a foot on a seat on the El train, a hazy passerby captured through a doorway blurred by condensation. He composed with colour, often in large, abstract fields like in a painting by Rothko. New York, the city where he lived and worked until his death in 2013 at the age of 89, is glimpsed through windows, reflected in mirrors or metal surfaces (“Taxi, New York”, 1957, top), or partly concealed by shop awnings or iron railings.
These pictures encapsulate Leiter’s photographic style. At the top is the bright circle of her umbrella obscuring her face and shoulders, angled against the weather. In the third, from 1958, a woman in a grey dress and dark coat walks down the street, the ground covered with slushy snow, the whitewashed window behind her scrawled with graffiti. In another, from 1951, the umbrella takes up the whole bottom half of the image, a vibrant panel of colour. In one, from 1955, the umbrella is seen through a snow-dusted car window. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.Among the photographs on show in “Saul Leiter”, a new exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, are three featuring red umbrellas. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternative way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. But Leiter’s sensibility - comparable to the European intimism of Bonnard, a painter he greatly admires - placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein.
The semi-mythical notion of the ‘New York street photographer’ was born at the same time, in the late-1940s. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became - like an extension of his arm and mind - an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter and through his friendship with the abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for forty years afterwards they remained virtually unknown to the art world.
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