Inspiration: Saul Leiter

When I watch Alex Kilbee’s The Photographic Eye, it feels a bit like sitting with a thoughtful photographer friend who has done the homework for you. He doesn’t just say “Saul Leiter was great”; he slows down and shows why the pictures work; how colour, shape, and atmosphere quietly hold the frame together. In this video on why Saul Leiter’s “bad” photos are actually masterpieces, Alex pulls out the very things I have always found most compelling in Leiter’s work: the way colour becomes subject, how weather is a collaborator, and how he lets ambiguity do a lot of the storytelling.

Colour as subject, not just decoration

What pulls me to Saul Leiter is his commitment to colour as more than a “nice extra”. In many of his New York photographs, the red of an umbrella, a yellow taxi, or a block of signage isn’t supporting detail — it is the picture. Large patches of colour sit in the frame like paint on a canvas, often taking up more space than the people themselves.

This resonates with how I like to work. Even though black and white still feels “classier” and often prints better, it removes something I don’t want to lose. Colour can be mood, memory, and temperature all at once. Leiter leans fully into that. Many of his frames would fall apart in monochrome; they depend on that small flash of red or green to hold everything together.

Alex’s video underlines how some of these colour choices look “wrong” if you’re chasing technical perfection — blown highlights, blocked shadows, heavy grain or softness. But in Leiter’s hands, those imperfections are part of the language. They push the image closer to painting: less about sharp detail, more about feeling.

Frames within frames, glass, weather, and abstraction

Another thing I enjoy is how Leiter rarely gives us the street in a straightforward way. We see the city through things, café windows, fogged glass, falling snow, raindrops on glass, narrow slices between buildings or car doors.

Alex points out how much of what might be called “bad conditions” like rain, snow, low contrast, becomes a gift in Leiter’s photographs. Instead of waiting for clear weather, he uses all that mess in the air as a filter. People turn into silhouettes. Cars and signs dissolve into soft shapes. The surface of the window becomes as important as whatever is behind it. This is also where I see his love of frames within frames. We often look past a dark foreground shape (a door frame, the edge of a car window, an out of focus sign) into a smaller area where the “story” happens, often pushed to a corner of the picture. That layering builds a sense that we are peeking into the scene rather than standing in the middle of it.

Recently I came across a series of photographs by Ruben N Rosa on Instagram (@rubennrosa). Shot through rain-covered glass, cars, umbrellas and people are pushed into soft shapes behind sharp droplets. In one frame an orange car becomes almost a flat block of colour; in another, a bus stop scene is held inside the rectangle of a shelter window, broken by a row of yellow dots. It is hard not to think of Saul Leiter in the way he uses weather, surfaces, and frames within the frame to move the picture toward abstraction, while still keeping it very much his own world.

Leaving room for ambiguity

One line from the video that stayed with me is:

“Leave some ambiguity… let the viewer do some of the work.”

Alex uses this to explain why Leiter’s compositions feel so rich even when very little is spelled out. Faces are often hidden, cropped, or blurred. Key details disappear into shadow or fog. The subject might be partially blocked by a passing bus, a patch of colour, or a reflection. Instead of telling us exactly what to think, the photograph offers hints and lets our mind fill in the rest. (Read: Ambiguity engages imagination).

One photograph I keep returning to is Through Boards, 1957. The street is reduced to a narrow slit and a single car passing through. Very little seems to happen, yet the crop, the weight of the colour, and the empty space around that small slice of life make it a picture I can look at again and again.

This connects strongly to how ambiguity is often discussed in photography: if everything is crystal clear and explained, there is nothing left for the viewer to discover. By withholding some information, you invite people to stay with the image a bit longer, to connect their own experiences and stories to that frozen moment.

In Leiter’s case, ambiguity comes from:

  • Obscured subjects – seen through fogged glass, rain or reflections.
  • Partial information – a hand, a hat, a leg stepping into frame rather than a full figure.
  • Strange crops – important elements are pushed to the edge, almost falling out of the frame.
  • Temporal uncertainty – snow, steam and blur make it hard to tell exactly where or when we are.

All of this forces the viewer to “do some of the work” to connect the dots, imagine the space outside the frame, and decide what the photograph means to them.

Negative space and the quiet parts of the frame

Alongside colour and abstraction, what I respond to most is his use of negative space. Whole areas of the image are left “empty” — a wall of snow, an out-of-focus window, a dark block of shadow — while the subject occupies a small, often off-centre portion of the frame.

That empty space is not really empty; it carries mood. It can feel like cold air, silence, or the weight of the city. It’s also where the picture breathes. Instead of stacking detail upon detail, Leiter gives us room to rest our eye and slowly discover the small figure, the umbrella, or the taxi hiding inside that field of colour.

For me this is especially clear in this photograph from the Saul Leiter Foundation color gallery. Most of the frame is “empty” – large, muted areas that don’t say much in a literal sense – yet that emptiness is exactly what gives the small figure and the thin strip of activity their weight. The negative space feels like silence the picture is built on.

As someone who enjoys working with space in my own photographs, this gives me permission to be less afraid of “wasted” areas in the frame. A big patch of sky, a wall, or a blur of colour doesn’t have to be filled with subject matter to justify its existence. Sometimes it is the subject.

Key Points

From this video and from revisiting Saul Leiter’s work, here are some key takeaway points:

  • Treat colour as the main character
    Not every frame needs to be about a person or a clear subject. Sometimes a patch of red or green can carry the whole picture.
  • Use bad weather as an ally
    Rain, fog, and haze are not obstacles to be avoided. They are tools that soften edges, hide details, and create layers.
  • Compose through windows and edges
    Instead of always stepping into the open, look for frames within frames — glass, reflections, doorways, parked cars and let those shapes direct where the eye travels.
  • Trust ambiguity
    We don’t need to explain everything in a single frame. Allowing parts of the scene to remain unclear or hidden can make an image more engaging. Leave enough clues, but not the whole story.
  • Let negative space breathe
    Resist the urge to fill the frame. Sometimes the “empty” parts, snow, sky, a wall, a blur of colour, are what give the small human gesture its weight.

External Links

These are some useful starting points if you want to go deeper into Saul Leiter’s life and work, or if you want links you can safely reference in your own note:

About Alex Kilbee and The Photographic Eye

Like Ted Forbes, Alex Kilbee has become one of those YouTube voices I keep returning to. The Photographic Eye is not a gear channel; it’s about seeing. With more than 200k subscribers, Alex uses his long experience as a working photographer to break down why certain pictures work, often by looking at masters like Leiter, Ernst Haas, and others.


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