saul leiter: street photographer who enjoyed anonymity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L5i9tbSsqE

Saul Leiter’s photography

ChatGPT said:

Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was an American photographer and painter best known for his pioneering work in color street photography during a time when black-and-white photography was still considered the standard for serious art. Though he worked largely under the radar for much of his life, Leiter has since come to be recognized as a quiet revolutionary in the field of photography.

Key Aspects of Saul Leiter’s Photography:

  1. Color as Mood and Abstraction:
    Leiter was one of the earliest photographers to embrace color film artistically, starting in the 1940s. He used Kodachrome slide film to produce richly layered images where color wasn’t just descriptive—it became emotional, abstract, and painterly.
  2. Painterly Vision:
    With a background in painting, Leiter brought a strong compositional sensitivity to his photographs. His images often feature soft focus, reflections, fogged windows, overlapping planes, and unexpected framing. These painterly qualities make his work feel intimate and poetic.
  3. The Everyday, Seen Differently:
    Leiter’s subjects were often mundane—city streets, passersby, signage, umbrellas, buses—but he photographed them with a lyrical, almost meditative eye. He was less interested in grand narratives and more in fragments, gestures, fleeting moments, often partially obscured or layered.
  4. Street Photography, Reimagined:
    While contemporaries like Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand captured the dynamism and grit of urban life, Leiter turned inward, offering a more quiet, poetic, and even melancholic vision of New York.
  5. Delayed Recognition:
    Though he worked in commercial fashion photography for magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, his artistic work remained underappreciated until much later. Recognition came in the 2000s, especially with the 2006 monograph Early Color and the 2012 documentary In No Great Hurry.

Influences and Legacy:

  • Leiter is now considered a precursor to modern color photography, influencing later generations of street photographers.
  • His approach aligns visually and spiritually more with Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist painters than with documentary photographers.
  • His work is frequently compared to that of William Eggleston and Helen Levitt, but his tone is more introspective.