It was actually Smith who encouraged him to pursue photography.
In his classes he befriended Richard Pousette-Dart who was a painter as well as William Eugene Smith America photojournalist. His early paintings were full of colours and inspired by expressionism. At first he actually wanted to become a painter and when he came to Manhattan he enrolled in art school. He actually got his first camera (which was a Detrola camera) long before this time from his mother. influenced by his father he studied to become a Rabbi but he left theology school and moved to New York at the age of 23 to become an artist. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburg and it seemed for a long time that he would go in a different direction than being an artist. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternative way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. But Leiter’s sensibility - comparable to the European intimism of Bonnard, a painter he greatly admires - placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. The semi-mythical notion of the ‘New York street photographer’ was born at the same time, in the late-1940s.
Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became - like an extension of his arm and mind - an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter and through his friendship with the abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for forty years afterwards they remained virtually unknown to the art world.
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