Saul Leiter

The son of an eminent rabbi, Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. As a teenager, he became interested in painting. In 1946, at the age of 23, he left theological education and his life in Cleveland to move to New York and try his luck as a painter. Shortly afterwards, he met Richard Pousette-Dart, an abstract expressionist painter who was beginning to experiment with photography. His friendship with Richard Pousette-Dart and the photographer Eugene Smith, as well as the many exhibitions of photographs he saw in New York, were to be a great inspiration to Saul Leiter.

In 1948, he played with colour using out-of-date film. He photographed the city and his small circle of friends with a unique sense of composition and abstraction. Edward Steichen invited him to exhibit at MoMA in 1953. In 1958, Saul Leiter began working in fashion, publishing in Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. For the next 20 years, he continued to be published by the international fashion press.

From the early 1980s to the early 2000s, his work was virtually forgotten. In 2006, with the help of art historian Martin Harrison and collector Howard Greenberg, he published his first book of street photographs - Saul Leiter: Early Color, published by Steidl Verlag - a resounding success that led to exhibitions all over the world.

In 2012, Tomas Leach directed a feature film In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter. At the end of 2013, Saul Leiter died, leaving behind a collection of tens of thousands of photographs, the majority of which never saw the light of day.