From the split-second the shutter is pressed, every photograph becomes a memory – a captured moment, forever gone. Some photographers try to fight the inevitable passage of time by recording a scene with the utmost clarity, whereas others choose to embrace that inherent nostalgia by creating images that are every bit as selective, suggestive and blurry as our own faltering memories.

Perhaps the very first photographer to truly explore this latter aesthetic is the late, great Saul Leiter. Born in Pittsburgh in 1923, he has been feted in recent years for the photographs he took on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1940s and 1950s. While the period’s fashions, cars and shop fronts appeal to a contemporary audience enthralled by Mad Men and mid-century modern, it was the way that Leiter bent the world into his own poetic, artistic vision that truly delights.

British curator and writer Martin Harrison is largely responsible for the rediscovery of Leiter’s work in the 21st century, thanks to his landmark monograph, Early Color, published by Steidl in 2006. When the author first met Leiter in the early 1990s, he would join him out on the streets with his camera. “It was a revelation to see the way he could photograph someone as though he were invisible,” recalls Harrison today. “He was the antithesis of, say, Diane Arbus: he would sort of curl up within himself and not be noticed – not impinge. I then realised how he achieved all those partly voyeuristic and non-interventionist photographs.” As Ulrich Rüter puts it in the 2012 catalogue to Leiter’s exhibition at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen: “Even in the thickest tangle of the city, his pictures display a blatant, eloquent composure.”

A frustrated painter, Leiter used a shallow depth of field to create great swathes of colour within his street photography, a nod to the abstract expressionist art movement of the era. A fondness for silhouetted figures and cheap, out-of-date film further add to the sense of his photographs as half-forgotten memories, in which bold tones blend richly like gouache paint and tight crops underline his innate sense of composition. 

It was art that brought Leiter to New York in the first place. After begging his mother for a Detrola camera in his teens, he was told in no uncertain terms by his father – a respected Talmudic scholar fluent in seven languages – that photography was akin to pornography.

While still in the Midwest he turned his attention to painting and, following brief stints at university and rabbinical school, two strangers visiting from New York bought one of his abstract paintings from an exhibition in Pittsburgh. That they happened to be the famous choreographer Merce Cunningham and avant-garde composer John Cage no doubt encouraged Leiter to leave home and take a bus to Manhattan in 1946.

After a difficult start that involved several nights sleeping rough in Central Park, Leiter took a series of menial jobs and befriended the future Magnum photojournalist W Eugene Smith, who gave him a camera and a copy of Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet. Before long, his own monochrome photographs appeared in Life magazine and Edward Steichen’s influential Always the Young Strangers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the press release for which described Leiter’s contribution as: “Several prints of a surrealist nature.”

In the early 1960s, Leiter moved to the East Village – his home until his death on 26 November 2013 – and almost all his street photographs were taken within a few blocks of his apartment. It was during this time that he also began taking the affectionate monochrome portraits of female friends and lovers that feature in the new monograph, In My Room, which has been co-edited by Margit Erb, his assistant for 18 years at the Howard Greenberg Gallery and director of the Saul Leiter Foundation. Creating a book from scratch without Leiter’s input for the first time was a daunting task for Margit, but she was helped by his previous attempt to get a similar project off the ground.

In the 1970s, the photographer made around 3,000 prints that provided a series of clues: “Saul went back and printed some of his favourite images over and over again, as if he was trying to perfect the image,” she says. “For example, the cover image is a picture of a woman called Inez and she’s taking her shirt off – he printed that maybe four or five times.”

While Margit has referred to In My Room as Leiter’s ‘nudes’ book for the last 18 months, she deliberately chose to leave such a loaded word out of the published title. “A more appropriate word would be ‘intimates’,” she says. “He was genuinely interested in the women that he was friends and lovers with – it was not only about taking their pictures but also about understanding them. You can really see that in the photographs: the respect for their intelligence and their feelings.”

Unsurprisingly, the greatest commercial success of Leiter’s early career came as a women’s fashion photographer. He set up a studio on Fifth Avenue in 1963 and spent the next 18 years creating magazine covers and spreads for the likes of Harper’s Bazaar alongside his contemporaries Richard Avedon and Hiro. He later quit the fashion world when he saw that people were supervising his work and, in doing so, turned his back on financial stability.

Suggest to Margit that Leiter not being career-minded is a huge understatement and she hoots with laughter. He missed the opportunity to feature in Steichen’s follow-up 1955 MoMA exhibition The Family of Man, a veritable who’s who of mid-century photography, because, she says, “he got distracted and wanted to do something else that day,” while Harper’s art director Henry Wolf has recalled him turning up to his first portfolio review looking like “an unmade bed”.

Likewise, when Saul enjoyed his long overdue career renaissance in his last decade, he regularly refused to do interviews and turned down an Annie Leibovitz shoot for Vanity Fair. Even his belated recognition as a pioneer of early street photography brought a series of bashful rebukes. In Tomas Leach’s fascinating 2012 documentary In No Great Hurry, Leiter says, “If you really knew what has been done and tried by other people, you’d realise that nothing is terribly new.”

With his reluctance to bathe in the spotlight, Leiter instead spent his days building up a phenomenal body of work that even those around him are still struggling to comprehend. Around 300,000 slides now reside in the foundation’s air-conditioned storage unit in Lower Manhattan, while Leiter’s early embrace of digital technologies, aided by the donation of a DSLR camera and $10,000 from Olympus in 2004, added another 5,000 digital images to that total.

Luckily, demand for Leiter’s work has hit an all-time high. The 2016 exhibition Saul Leiter: Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London welcomed almost 6,000 visitors in the first weekend alone, while the makers of several recent Hollywood movies, including Todd Haynes’ Carol and Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, have cited him as a major inspiration. In the official notes for the latter, production designer Kristi Zea revealed how she was drawn to Leiter’s “painterly lushness and emphasis on fragmentation and isolation.”

The publication of In My Room is yet further evidence that the Jewish faith’s loss was photography’s gain and this self-deprecating, bemused and amusing character deserves his place among the medium’s greatest ever exponents.

An edited version of this article was originally published in issue 199 of Black + White Photography, February 2017. All images © Saul Leiter Foundation/Howard Greenberg Gallery.