Recently, I watched a documentary called In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life from Saul Leiter. Watch the trailer below.

An unassuming man who shunned attention, Saul Leiter photographed on the streets of New York, mostly within a few blocks of his East Village apartment. With their rich layering and swaths of beautiful color, his images induced moments of quietude and contemplation amid the bustle and chaos of New York City street life. – David Walker, PDN News

Leiter (1923 – 2013) was legendary for his use of colour. Based in New York City, he did fashion shoots to earn a living. Yet, he has become known for his impressionistic colour work on the streets of the city where he lived in the same neighbourhood for over sixty years.

According to one article from Photographers Speak, Leiter was a “quiet iconoclast,” working in colour at a time when most fine art photographers worked in black and white.

He shot vertically rather than horizontally most of the time.

He used telephoto lenses to compress perspective rather than the more typical wide angle for street photography.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes from the film.

Below are links to more articles about Leiter and the quotes that stood out to me.

An Interview with Saul Leiter from Photographers Speak

“He had a distinct visual grammar that featured off-center perspectives, compressed spatial dynamics, and a predilection for breaking up the frame in unpredictable and exciting ways.”

“I admired a tremendous number of photographers, but for some reason I arrived at a point of view of my own.” ~ Saul Leiter

“I never felt the need to do what everyone else did. And I wasn’t troubled by the fact that other people were doing other things.” ~ Saul Leiter

“I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.” ~ Saul Leiter

7 Lessons Saul Leiter Has Taught Me About Street Photography by Eric Kim

“I think I’ve said this before many times—that photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you had never paid any attention to. And as you photograph, one of the benefits is that the world becomes a much richer, juicier, visual place. Sometimes it is almost unbearable — it is too interesting. And it isn’t always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep taking pictures every second of your life.” ~ Saul Leiter

A Casual Conversation with Saul Leiter – Time Magazine

“Max Kozloff said to me one day, ‘You’re not really a photographer. You do photography, but you do it for your own purposes – your purposes are not the same as others’. I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I like that. I like the way he put it.” ~ Saul Leiter

Postscript: Saul Leiter (1923-2013) via The New Yorker

“The overriding emotion in his work is a stillness, tenderness, and grace that is at odds with the mad rush of New York street life.”

“The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water.”

A Short Interview with Saul Leiter via In-Public

Obituary, Saul Leiter, The Guardian

See a collection of photographs by Leiter at this New Yorker article. Or watch this 5 minute meditative slideshow set to the music of Miles Davis.

Videos

Saul Leiter on Vimeo – a 14 minute interview from a year before his death.

Saul Leiter in Conversation with photography critic, Vince Aletti