![Self-portrait with [his sister and first model] Deborah, 1940s.](https://media.guim.co.uk/4f484117ebd7e0be7907b5fedb38ba327930f910/0_0_1920_1267/1000.jpg)
One evening in 1946, Saul Leiter took a train from his native Pittsburgh to New York. Aged 22, he was leaving behind his family and friends as well as the life that had been mapped out for him by his father, an esteemed orthodox rabbi, who had expected his son to follow in his footsteps. “I turned away from everything he believed in and cared about,” Leiter would later say, that decision having caused a rift between them that was never healed.
That youthful act of self-determination led to a long estrangement from his family, though his mother secretly kept in touch with him. It also started Leiter on a singular creative journey that would culminate some 60 years later with his belated canonisation as one of the most gifted and mysterious photographers of the latter half of the 20th century.
“Saul lost everything when he moved to New York,” says Anne Morin, curator of Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World, a major retrospective of his work that opens soon at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. “But, even though he rejected his upbringing, it shaped him as an artist. From the moment he left Pittsburgh, he was someone who did not fit into any community, artistic or otherwise. He lived like a monk in his New York apartment and led an almost clandestine creative life, totally uninterested in fame or even recognition.”
In a recently published book, Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, Leiter sums up his outlook during his long years of obscurity. “I wasn’t ambitious or driven,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I don’t admire success the way some people do. I was fortunate to fulfil my ambition to be unsuccessful.”
Like Vivian Maier, the nanny whose secret archive was discovered a few years after her death in 2009, Leiter shot on the streets of Manhattan. Yet while she wandered far and wide, he stayed close to home, never venturing beyond a few blocks’ radius of his apartment on East 10th Street. Unlike William Klein’s frenetic, neon-lit city, or Berenice Abbott’s towering modernist metropolis, Saul Leiter’s New York is an intimately observed world of gesture and detail: luminous, otherworldly and oddly tranquil. Streets and buildings are bathed in soft light and warm colours, his use of reflections, blur and shadow approaching the abstract or dreamlike. People are partially glimpsed in passing cars, or photographed through vertical spaces between buildings or hoardings. Viewed through smeared or steamed-up windows, they sometimes seem like spectral silhouettes.
He captured the city and its people in all seasons, against brightly painted storefronts in summer sunlight, and enveloped in snow or partially obscured by rain in the harsh New York winter. Often, his subjects are caught in moments of quiet reverie amid, but apart from, the city’s bustle and hum.
“As a photographer, he was never seduced by the idea of New York as the mythical city that never stops,” says Morin. “He was always attuned to the small rather than the big, to the silence rather than the noise. For him, the city revealed itself in the tiny details of everyday life, but he also wanted to somehow peer through the skin of its surface reality to see something else, something ephemeral but full of meaning.”
Leiter’s clandestine creative journey began in 1938, aged 15, when he started painting and sketching in his spare time between school studies. The following year, his mother gave him a Detrola camera, igniting his interest in the medium for which he is now best known, but throughout his life he continued painting. His vast archive contains more than 4,000 abstract pieces and geometric landscapes, mostly watercolours. At the Milton Keynes gallery, the full range of his work will be on display: black and white as well as colour images, fashion photographs, languorously erotic portraits of his longtime partner, Soames Bantry, a former model, and her beautiful friends, as well as his paintings and painted-over photographs.
“I have intentionally mixed everything together rather than arranging the work in different categories,” says Morin. “Leiter did not have the intention to create an oeuvre, but instead he produced all these fragments that continuously grew and came together to form this huge territory – his unfinished world.”
When he arrived in New York as a young man, Leiter slept on park benches before finding a cheap apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. He befriended the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who became a formative influence, alongside the photographer Eugene Smith. Throughout this time, Leiter’s aversion to success was already apparent: in the 1950s, he turned down an offer of an exhibition from an important art dealer, Betty Parsons, whose patronage was much sought after by other up-and-coming artists. Later in life, he liked to tell the story of how he was admonished for the smallness of his paintings by the artist Franz Kline, who told him: “If you only worked big, you would be one of the boys.”
Leiter’s temperament was such that he was never going to be one of the boys, but in the late 1950s and throughout the 60s he reluctantly became a fashion photographer in order to survive, as well as finance his more personal work. The images he created for Harper’s Bazaar and later for British magazines such as Nova and Man About Town are captivating in their quiet subversion, but often seem constrained and altogether less atmospheric than his personal work. An exception is a striking image made for Nova, in which he posed Bantry on a stretch of urban wasteground alongside a little boy, both of them intently reading comics against a backdrop of derelict houses. It’s wilfully unglamorous and downbeat, and prefigures the casual, low-key approach of a generation of young, edgy photographers who came of age in the 1980s.
In the equally mysterious Bantry, Leiter found a soulmate – someone who shared his lack of interest in fame and was also an avid painter. They met in 1958, when she was newly arrived in New York in search of work as a model. For most of their time together they lived in the same building, but in separate apartments, the walls of his work space covered in her oil paintings of flowers and people. “They were two independent souls who had no desire to fit in,” says Morin. “They wanted to be creatively free and to embrace life on their own terms. And, they succeeded.” When Bantry died in 2002 they were living together in her apartment, where Leiter remained, surrounded by her work, until his death in 2013, aged 89.
It was on the streets surrounding their building that he made the colour photographs for which he is now remembered. Their belated discovery challenged the received history of colour photography in America, given that Leiter began experimenting with the tonal possibilities of colour two decades before the likes of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, whose embrace of the same in the early 1970s caused such controversy among critics and traditionalists.
In the Milton Keynes show, Morin has chosen to give equal prominence to his black and white photographs, which, she says, “have all but disappeared in the myth of Saul Leiter”.
That myth is as much to do with the wilful nature of his clandestine creative life as the quiet audacity of his colour photography. Although his work had fitfully appeared in various group exhibitions in the 1960 and 70s, Leiter did not have a solo exhibition until 1993, when the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York featured some of his black and white photographs.
It wasn’t until a decade later, though, when the same gallery hosted a show entitled Saul Leiter: Early Color, that his photographs really began to garner attention. A book of the same name, his first monograph, was published the following year, when he was 82. It was greeted as revelatory by a photography world taken by surprise by his very existence. “I used to be unknown and that was very restful and pleasurable,” he told the writer Adam Harrison Levy in 2009. “Now I have become known, and people want to interview me.”
In Levy’s essay for Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, he sees a connection between Leiter’s orthodox Jewish upbringing – he once described himself as a “rabbinical ghost” – and his quietly inquiring approach to photography.
“[Leiter] retained the last vestiges of his Talmudic schooling, where inquiry and the interpretation of texts were taught and fostered. He had absorbed that way of interrogating the world but had transposed it to the visual realm: he saw the streets of New York, and its inhabitants, with the narrative insight of a Talmudic scholar. The streets were his text.”
For all the attention he received in the last decade of his life, Leiter remains an enigma, a remarkably self-effacing artist who walked to his own beat and went out in search of what Morin calls “the incisive moment” every day, on the same few streets, for nigh on 60 years.
“I aspired to be unimportant,” he said of his working life as a photographer of the everyday sublime. In that, at least, he was unsuccessful.
• Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 17 February-2 June
• Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo is published by Thames & Hudson (£60). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
This article was amended on 6 February 2024. Leiter was 82, not 72, when he published his first monograph
