At The Howard Greenberg Gallery they say Saul Leiter's images are the most requested. They call him “Their hot old man!”    And they say Saul loves it.
There have been times in Saul's life when he was not so well known, so popular.    But he took that with equanimity too.    Saul says, “I spent a great deal of my life being ignored.    I was always very happy that way.    Being ignored is a great privilege.    That is how I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently.    Photography teaches you how to look and to see.    If you're able to look and to see, you're very lucky because many others don't do that.    Nowadays they're usually talking on their cell phones.”
     Saul almost became a rabbi.    His father was a Talmudic scholar, one of the greatest of the day.    If he didn't become a rabbi he was told, he was doomed.    Doomed.    So when he was in the Pittsburg Rabbinical school he spent his time in the library looking at art books.Most interviewers say Saul went to New York to paint. came to New York to get away from his rabbinical future.
    But he was unprepared for the world in which he lived.    He painted but he didn't make any money.    His friend Richard Pousette Dart, an abstract expressionist who repaired cameras and puttered around said photography could earn money. So he tried it. People told him he couldn't do this, couldn't do that, he couldn't do fashion. But he did. W. Eugene Smith the noted photojournalist pushed him to see Alexey Brodovitch the legendary art director at Harper's Bazaar. He became close friends with Henry Wolf who published his work in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen and Nova.    It was quirky, original work.    A bag lady dressed in furs.    A large brim hat shot with outdated color film.
Saul took to roaming the streets with a Leica, capturing striking frozen moments of tension and color.    He did color in the late 40's before it was popular.    “Some people,”he said, “had an aversion to color.    Walker Evans spoke against color, but then took a lot of time walking around taking color Polaroids.    So much for Walker.    You shouldn't take too seriously what artists say.”“Photography,” he says, “is the moment one catches, but one doesn't get the moment of truth from that.    A photograph is a photograph.    You ask too much of it if you want it to tell the truth.    When I was 14 I wrote a little poem that began, 'The truth, there is no truth...”
Bob Sharpe