The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter

This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first, in 2022, surveyed the work of Vivian Maier, who at her death left behind a vast quantity of prints and negatives: evidence of a hidden life unsuspected even by those in whose household she lived and worked for four decades. There are continuities between Maier and the subject of the current show, Saul Leiter. They were contemporaries, loners who lived into their eighties (Leiter died four years after Maier, in 2013), prolific but uninterested in recognition, their reputations largely posthumous.

Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, like Andy Warhol and, like Warhol, he got out. His father was an austere Talmudic scholar, and Leiter dutifully studied to become a rabbi. When he gave up theology school in 1946 and moved to New York to pursue painting, he was promptly disinherited. Introduced to photography as an outpost of avant-garde concerns by the youngest of the abstract expressionists, Richard Pousette-Dart, Leiter began to try his hand in black and white, then in colour, at a time when the latter was regarded as the province of advertising, or vacation snapshots, or the news from nowhere found in National Geographic magazine.

Street photography was a response to the growth of American cities during the 1930s and the Depression, which encouraged a new documentary candour – and was well served by the small and silent 35mm Leica, available from 1924. But the street came into its own as a subject after 1945, when photographers embraced graininess, blur and the Manichaean dramas of monochrome. With no formal training, and no agenda, Leiter began to explore what lay to hand: his circle of friends, his immediate surroundings.