'I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see...fragments of endless possibilities' Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter was one of the first so-called Street Photographers of the famous New York School in the 1950s and 60s to use colour. To me, Leiter comes across as a highly instinctive photographer with an ability to capture seemingly mundane moments and make them beautiful. He doesn't appear to have set up his shots; he just walked, observed and captured. In interviews, his dry and self-deprecating sense of humour makes him all the more accessible:

'Sometimes I worked with a lens that I had when I might have preferred another lens. I think Picasso once said that he wanted to use green in a painting but since he didn't have it he used red instead. Perfection is not something I admire. A touch of confusion is a desirable ingredient'

This photo (below right), taken on a rainy day in New York in 1956, captures a fleeting moment. Unsurprisingly, at this time Saul Leiter collected film stills from a number of famous early Italian movies. The title 'Yellow Scarf' and the dashes of complimentary pigments illustrate his attraction to colour. This was at a time when everyone else was using black and white. For us, perhaps the use of colour brings this image into today; black and white photography can sometimes create a nostalgic view distancing the past from our daily lives. Often, he liked to use out of date film for it's unpredictable effects. This is just one of the many images that illustrate Leiter's talent for creatively capturing the mundane.

His street photographs from this period appear to have fed a need in Leiter to observe and record. His colour images went unrecognised for a long time. It's not surprising that after a long career working as a commercial fashion photographer he is now a painter of colourfully charged abstract art.