So it might seem strange that most of this discussion takes place inside his apartment - until you see the place. Leiter lived in Manhattan’s Lower East Side for more than 60 years and photographed the neighborhood for just as long. The film’s “lessons,” a baker’s dozen of gnomic titles, are pulled from the ongoing dialogue between subject and filmmaker, a conversation that ranges from Leiter’s personal biography to the pretensions of art photography. In tightly composed frames he creates abstraction in the everyday without obscuring familiar elements. Leiter, who is also a painter, finds a vibrant color palette hiding among New York’s grays and browns. Their straightforward titles - “Snow,” “Street Scene,” “Newspaper Kiosk” - hint at Leiter’s humility, but belie the depths of his artistry. As Kozloff speaks, we see a slideshow of photos. Only in the early 2000s did his street photography begin earning the attention it deserves.

After inclusion in two Museum of Modern Art shows in the 1950s, he worked in relative obscurity, making a living shooting fashion photography. But it quickly becomes apparent that he is an eminently worthy subject.įor the uninitiated, Leach begins with a brief reading by art historian and critic Max Kozloff, who places the artist “at the top in the Mount Olympus of New York photography… he’s right up there with the amazing heights of photographic history itself.” Leiter shot in color long before it was fashionable, let alone accepted as an art medium. (“You know, you walk down the street and… you look in a window and there’s this old guy walking along with you and you realize that’s who you are!”) Mostly Leiter is baffled by Leach’s persistent desire to film him. But he’s feisty and funny and self-deprecating. And he sometimes halts mid-sentence as though his thought snagged on a mental nail. Yes, he walks slowly, his head bowed forward. But in the film, Leiter is still very much alive. The street photographer died last November, a week shy of his 90th birthday and not too long after the completion of Leach’s documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter. Perhaps Tomas Leach knew he was creating an elegy for Saul Leiter.

In no great hurry