My friend Henry once said that I had a talent for being indifferent to opportunities. It’s not that I didn’t want to have my work appreciated, but for some reason - maybe it’s because my father disapproved of almost everything I did - in some secret place in my being was a desire to avoid success. “I’ve never been overwhelmed with a desire to become famous. I like the Zen artists: they’d do some work, and then they’d stop for a while.” I have a deep-seated distrust and even contempt for people who are driven by ambition to conquer the world … those who cannot control themselves and produce vast amounts of crap that no one cares about.

I never thought of my existence as being that important. 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.“I’m sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. 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. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.” But fame did arrive. That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. “I spent a great deal of my life being ignored,” he told the New Yorker’s Vince Aletti. And as far as fame goes that was largely it until many years later. His work was spotted by Edward Steichen, who included 23 of Leiter’s photographs in Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953 and 20 of Leiter’s colour images in the 1957 MoMA conference Experimental Photography in Color. The Rabbi’s son schooled in Jewish law and history found his metier in photography. Leiter was 23 when he left his native Pittsburgh for New York. Saul Leiter (1923-2013) found warmth in the rain and snow falling on New York City. And I don’t think one should have to apologize for it.” – Saul Leiter

But I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty – a delight in the nice things in the world.

Saul leiter color photography