The photographer who changed the way the world saw New York

Now recognized as one of the great photographers of the 20th century, he embraced color when most professional photographers were still loyal to black and white.

Saul Leiter had a thing for umbrellas. They pepper his mid-century photographs of New York, popping up over years of work: pink umbrellas, red umbrellas, yellow umbrellas. Their owners remain hidden underneath, dry and out of sight, upstaged by their vivid canopies. In “Saul Leiter: An Unfinished Word,” a joyous new retrospective on view at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, England, these umbrellas sing out from the walls. As do orange shop signs, scarlet curtains and the custard dashes of cabs. Leiter, who died in 2013, is now recognized as one of the great color photographers of the 20th century, a pioneer who embraced — and experimented with — color slide film when most professional photographers were still wedded to monochrome negatives. Against muted Manhattan backdrops of concrete, stone and smoke stacks, he focused on the blinking neon and candy-striped barber signs. Leiter’s abstracted shots of New York seem radical, yet they are true to how we all see the streets: fragmented by traffic, building facades, doorways, angles and crowds. By embracing that jumbled, naturalistic viewpoint, Leiter could create a collage within a single frame, a snap-and-grab of all the urban elements glanced on the fly. Into these cut-up compositions, we see pedestrians and policemen, store workers, dog walkers and construction workers, but not as specific characters, more as notes on a musical score. Leiter’s photographs are often interrupted, confused or ornamented — and sometimes all three — by the whims of weather and atmospheric effects. Figures are seen through veils of condensation or snow; taxis barrel and blur through the rain; a traffic light punctuates a blizzard. “A window covered in raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person,” he remarked in the 2013 documentary “In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter.” Leiter was not supposed to have been a photographer. He was born in 1923 into a strictly observant Jewish family in Pittsburgh and was expected to become a Rabbi like his father, a Talmud scholar. That all changed in 1946 when Saul caught a train to New York. He was 23 and wanted to be a painter. He would remain estranged from his father for most of his adult life.