The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter

This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first, in 2022, surveyed the work of Vivian Maier, who at her death left behind a vast quantity of prints and negatives: evidence of a hidden life unsuspected even by those in whose household she lived and worked for four decades. There are continuities between Maier and the subject of the current show, Saul Leiter. They were contemporaries, loners who lived into their eighties (Leiter died four years after Maier, in 2013), prolific but uninterested in recognition, their reputations largely posthumous.

Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, like Andy Warhol and, like Warhol, he got out. His father was an austere Talmudic scholar, and Leiter dutifully studied to become a rabbi. When he gave up theology school in 1946 and moved to New York to pursue painting, he was promptly disinherited.