Leiter was meant to continue that lineage, but he left his Cleveland seminary at age 23 and took a bus to New York City to begin his career in art. His father, a theological scholar and “a light in the diaspora,” as Leiter put it in the 2013 documentary In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, was a leader in the city’s Orthodox Jewish community. Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh to a Jewish family in which the men found their calling in the rabbinate. But the majority of Leiter’s work was left unprinted: hundreds of thousands of negatives and slides, which he kept stashed in boxes around his home. His cinematic eye and gauzy hues have been widely appreciated and tapped for inspiration-notably by filmmaker Todd Haynes for the Oscar-nominated Carol (2015), as well as Sam Mendes. In his final years and following his death, Leiter’s work was recognized at last, with major exhibitions and books.

He had made a living shooting fashion during the heyday of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, but by the ’80s, he was deep in debt and nearly forgotten. When William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, and Stephen Shore ushered in the era of color in the 1970s, Leiter, a private man who never sought fame, was barely a footnote. Walker Evans called color photography “vulgar,” and his contemporaries like Robert Frank and Ansel Adams agreed. He adopted the nascent medium in the 1940s, when it was relegated to splashy advertisements and amateur shooters, not fine artists. Yet except for his inner circle, no one saw Leiter’s personal color work until toward the end of his life.

Woman by Saul Leiter