‘An enigma, an artist who walked to his own beat’: the everyday sublime of photographer Saul Leiter

Self-portrait with [his sister and first model] Deborah, 1940s. Photograph: © 2023 Saul Leiter Foundation

One evening in 1946, Saul Leiter took a train from his native Pittsburgh to New York. Aged 22, he was leaving behind his family and friends as well as the life that had been mapped out for him by his father, an esteemed orthodox rabbi, who had expected his son to follow in his footsteps. “I turned away from everything he believed in and cared about,” Leiter would later say, that decision having caused a rift between them that was never healed.

That youthful act of self-determination led to a long estrangement from his family, though his mother secretly kept in touch with him. It also started Leiter on a singular creative journey that would culminate some 60 years later with his belated canonisation as one of the most gifted and mysterious photographers of the latter half of the 20th century.