Leiter died on 26 November 2013 in New York City. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.' Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Martin Harrison, editor and author of Early Color (2006), writes, 'Leiter’s sensibility.

Leiter is a featured subject, among others, in the documentary film Tracing Outlines (2015) by 2nd State Productions. Leiter is the subject of a 2012 feature-length documentary In No Great Hurry - 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, directed and produced by Tomas Leach. In 2008, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris mounted Leiter's first museum exhibition in Europe with an accompanying catalog. Leiter’s work is featured prominently in Jane Livingston’s book The New York School (1992) and in Martin Harrison’s Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945 (1991). In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper's Bazaar.Įdward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Leiter worked as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. He began associating with other contemporary photographers such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus and helped form what Jane Livingston has termed the New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s. In 1948, he started taking color photographs. Eugene Smith encouraged Leiter to pursue photography and he was soon taking black and white pictures with a 35 mm Leica, which he acquired for a few Eugene Smith prints. He had developed an early interest in painting and was fortunate to meet the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist.

His mother gave him his first camera at age 12.

His father was a well-known Talmud scholar and Saul studied to become a rabbi.

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.

Saul Leiter by Saul Leiter