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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