He lived with his partner Soames Bantry, a former model who was also a painter (they had separate apartments in the same block), often on the brink of poverty and unable to pay the rent.Īnd that is how it might have remained, had Leiter not been tracked down at the end of the 1980s by British art historian Martin Harrison, who had been looking for him for a decade. But in the 1970s, he gradually gave up fashion, continuing to paint and keeping up a parallel habit of street photography, which rarely took him far from the East Village. In those decades, Leiter ran a small studio on lower Fifth Avenue.

Leiter pushed the light-absorbing capacity of film to its limits. Saul Leiter's 'Daughter of Milton Abery',1950. He had started out as a painter but had later taken up photography, and during the late 1950s and 1960s – as others of the school had done – worked for fashion magazines, particularly Harper's Bazaar. One who might have remained unsung for the rest of his life was Saul Leiter, who had been working in New York since he arrived from Cleveland in 1946, aged 23. Others, such as Louis Faurer, were less famous but valued by their peers. Some, such as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, William Klein and Richard Avedon, already had international reputations. In 1992, when Jane Livingston's book The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963 was published, she corralled 16 into her group. A convenient shorthand for a cultural avant-garde, it was soon extended to include poets, composers, choreographers and, eventually, photographers. The term 'New York School' is usually applied to the group of abstract expressionist painters who lived and worked in New York in the mid-20th century.

Street photography saul leiter