Saul Leiter passed away at his home in New York City’s East Village on November 26, 2013, leaving behind an immense archive of his life’s work in art. The artist was the subject of Tomas Leach’s highly acclaimed 2013 documentary, Saul Leiter: In No Great Hurry, which continues to be shown at film festivals throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Also in 2008, Leiter had his first painting exhibition in 30 years, at Knoedler Gallery in New York. In 2008 Leiter traveled to Paris for his first European exhibition, at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 2006 the Milwaukee Museum of Art held the first U.S.

What Leiter called his “little book” became an overnight sensation with worldwide distribution and firmly established the artist as an early pioneer in the history of color photography.

In 2006, with the help of the art historian Martin Harrison and Howard Greenberg Gallery, the groundbreaking monograph Saul Leiter: Early Color was published by Gerhard Steidl in Germany. For the next two decades he lived and worked virtually unknown. In the early 1980s Leiter was faced with financial difficulties that forced the closure of his Fifth Avenue studio. His earliest photographs in black-and-white and color show an extraordinary affinity for the medium. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. Leiter made an enormous and unique contribution to photography with a highly prolific period in New York City in the 1950s. His main subjects were street scenes and his small circle of friends. Eugene Smith, along with the photography exhibitions he saw in New York (particularly Henri Cartier-Bresson’s at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947), inspired him.īy 1948 Leiter had begun to experiment in color, sometimes using Kodachrome 35 mm film past its sell-by date. Leiter’s friendship with Pousette-Dart, and soon after with W. Shortly after his arrival he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. In 1946, when he was 22, he left the theological college he was attending in Cleveland and moved to New York City to pursue painting.

Leiter’s interest in painting began in his late teens. The American artist Saul Leiter, the son of a rabbi and distinguished Talmudic scholar, was born in Pittsburgh in 1923.

Photographer saul leiter