In his long life as a photographer, Saul Leiter was “discovered” several times, but only lastingly in 2006, when he was 82, and a small book of his photographs, mostly taken in the 1950s and called Early Color, was published. He later confided to an interviewer some of the likely reasons for his previous anonymity: “In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined,” he suggested. “One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.”
Leiter, who died in 2013, took this picture, like nearly all of thousands of others, while walking in the few blocks around his apartment in New York. It is included in a new book of his work, Forever Saul Leiter, much of it found among his archive and published for the first time. The scene of butterflies being hung outside the porticoed building has all the formal levity that Leiter loved; though a picture of quiet and accidental slapstick, nothing in it, not the competing angles of the ladders or the man’s knee or the woman in the hat, seems a fraction out of place. “The street is like a ballet,” Leiter said. But only if you knew how to look.
Leiter gave up one vocation for another. He came from a long dynasty of rabbis; his father was a revered Talmudic scholar and leader of Pittsburgh’s Orthodox Jewish community, who never forgave his son for dropping out of rabbinical school to become a “lowlife” artist – first a painter – in Manhattan. In a documentary film made about his life, In No Great Hurry, Leiter suggested that sense of familial disapproval never quite left him. Still, he said, he had swapped one form of devotion for another: “I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera.”
Forever Saul Leiter is published by Thames & Hudson (£19.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
