Saul Leiter's Colour Photographs and the Art of Seeing Sideways
Saul Leiter began shooting colour on the streets of New York in the late 1940s, decades before William Eggleston's 1976 MoMA exhibition supposedly legitimised colour photography as art. Leiter's images — shot through rain-streaked windows, around doorframes, and between the bodies of passersby — refused the direct gaze that defined street photography. Instead, they offered a peripheral vision: oblique, partially obscured, and more interested in colour relationships than narrative clarity.
His compositional strategy owed more to abstract expressionism, which he encountered through friendships with Richard Pousette-Dart and Mark Rothko, than to photographic tradition. Large areas of undifferentiated colour — a red umbrella filling the frame's upper third, a yellow taxi bleeding across the right edge — create paintings that happen to contain photographic information rather than photographs that aspire to painterly qualities. The distinction matters: Leiter was not decorating reality but revealing its abstract structure.
Leiter's obscurity during his lifetime was partly chosen. He withdrew from commercial fashion photography in the 1980s, retreated to his East Village apartment, and continued shooting personal work that he rarely exhibited. The rediscovery began with the 2006 publication of Early Color by Steidl, which revealed four decades of work that rewrote colour photography's history — proving that the supposed innovation of the 1970s New Colour movement had been anticipated by twenty years.
The aesthetic lesson of Leiter's work is patience and peripheral attention. Where most street photographers seek the decisive moment — the peak of action, the perfect geometric alignment — Leiter sought the incidental: the half-seen figure, the reflection in a shop window, the accidental colour harmony created by a passing bus and a pedestrian's scarf. His photographs teach you to see not what confronts you directly but what exists at the margins of attention.
The Saul Leiter Foundation (https://www.saulleiterfoundation.org) maintains his archive and organises exhibitions worldwide. Their publications include previously unseen work that continues to expand understanding of his practice.
Apply Leiter's method to your own seeing. The next time you walk through a city, resist the urge to photograph what is directly in front of you. Instead, look through things, around things, and at the colour relationships that most photography ignores. The world seen sideways is richer than the world confronted head-on — and Leiter's fifty years of quiet looking proved it.
