Saul Leiter started off as a painter and was well-learned on modern art movements. French School of Artists - Impressionism & Les Nabis Overall, his desire to capture moving mundane aspects of living ties into his Zen beliefs. The frequent appearance of snow, umbrellas and rain, is also a common theme among ukiyo-e prints, depicting the harmony between man and nature. His work also involved heavily the depiction of weather conditions in New York City. “I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.“, Saul once said in his 2006 interview with Mitch Teich on WUWM’s Lake Effect. Some of those include umbrellas, taxis, shoes, hands - things that couldn’t be more ordinary, seemingly.

Saul Leiter’s Subject Matter in Street PhotographyĪ correlation can also be seen between Saul’s choice of subject matter and those often featured in ukiyo-e art - everyday life objects and elements of weather.Īs we shall see below, where I offer a more technical analysis of his experimentations on street photography, there are certain motifs that recurred throughout Saul’s entire body of street photography. It is a search of beauty in its purist form, absent the intention to stake a claim on cultural and socio-economic affairs. This is why Saul’s work exhibits a sense of timelessness - his pictures do not attempt to be more than what they are. This is a shared characteristic also commonly found in Japanese ukiyo-e (translates into ‘Pictures of the Floating World’) prints, which has a strong emphasis on depicting the here-and-now, the banal fragments of being human. He was about capturing fleeting, ephemeral sightings in everyday life.

Saul, however, remained largely apolitical, as far as his photographs were concerned. Many of them had a clear intention to document for social causes and used photography as a medium to raise awareness, or advance their views on certain public affairs.

His approach to photography was therefore markedly different from that of his peers who photographed in the same post-war period in America. The philosophy and intentions behind the work of Saul Leiter had a strong resonance with principles of Zen Buddhism, which celebrates the living in the moment yet without attachment to earthly pleasures. Saul Leiter’s Approach to Street Photography As described by Pauline Vermare, the curator of the exhibition “Photographer Saul Leiter: A Retrospective“, there were etchings of paintings by Koryusai hung on his wall among the heaps of collected items were Japanese calligraphy papers, vinyl records of Japanese musicals, and a massive library of books dedicated to Japanese literature, poetry, ceramics, ukiyo-e and Zen.

Saul leiter photos