Saul Leiter

I came across Saul Leiter a few months ago and his colour photography attracted my attention, not so much his fashion photography for which we was mostly known for, but for his street photography, which wasn't fully acknowledged for about 40 years. There are numerous street photographers, especially those documenting New York, but Leiter sought out 'moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.' I actually try to photograph the same way when doing my documentary photography, I like to capture individual subjects that then provide a story of themselves, separating them from the chaos around them, you can see my work at www.sarahpacker.com. But I will let his photographs say the rest. 

Taxi, New York, 1957

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

Lanesville, 1958

Harlem, 1960

New York, circa 1960

'None of Leiter’s contemporaries, with the single and partial exception of Helen Levitt, assembled a comparable body of work in color. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color: to the rapid recording of the spontaneous unfolding of life on the street, Leiter adds an unconventional sense of form and a brilliantly improvisational, and frequently almost abstract, use of found colors and tones. Leiter’s visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity and contingency is evoked in Saul Leiter: Early Color by one hundred subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the twentieth-century.'
( source : steidl ) http://www.gallery51.com/index.php?navigatieid=9&fotograafid=15