Saul Leiter obituary

Saul Leiter, who has died aged 89, was one of the quiet men of American photography. A pioneer of colour, he remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s. Even then, Leiter was reluctant to accept the belated praise heaped upon him. "What makes anyone think that I'm any good?" he asked Tomas Leach, who directed the feature-length documentary In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter (2012). "I'm not carried away by the greatness of Mr Leiter."

That greatness, though, was evident in his often painterly images, which evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour, at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. In the received history of American photography, it was Stephen Shore and William Eggleston who were the trailblazers of colour photography in the early 1970s, but Leiter was using Kodachrome colour slide film at least two decades earlier. The photographs he created are, in their softly lit, neon poetry, a direct contrast to the clamour and movement of William Klein's New York images or the out-of-kilter kinetic energy that characterises Gary Winogrand's street photographs.

Brigitte Woischnik, who co-edited the catalogue for a Leiter retrospective in Hamburg last year, dubbed him "the Promenader", which deftly suggests his relaxed but utterly attentive approach to street photography, a term that now seems too reductive when applied to his work. Leiter's street photographs, as unhurried as those of Helen Levitt, are more complex and impressionistic. They are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.

Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was given his first camera, a Detrola, by his mother in 1935, the year before the first Kodachrome film for 35mm cameras was produced by Kodak. In the 1940s, Leiter trained as a rabbi in Cleveland and simultaneously found some local success as a painter. His decision to pursue an artistic vocation caused considerable pain to his father, an Orthodox rabbi and scholar of some repute. "I turned away from everything he believed in and cared about," Leiter said. In 1947, one of his paintings was included in the Art Institute of Chicago's survey show Abstract and Surrealist American Art.

Having met and befriended the photographer W Eugene Smith, he began working seriously with a Rolleiflex. In 1951, his series The Wedding As a Funeral was published in Life magazine. By 1957, he was juggling art and fashion work. He contributed to Esquire magazine, and another of his series was included in an installation at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Experimental Photography in Colour, curated by Edward Steichen. (Three years earlier, when Steichen was putting together the exhibition The Family of Man at Moma, Leiter had declined his request to submit work for it, thinking his photographs were not up to the required standard.)

Leiter worked regularly as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar, Elle and British Vogue until the 1980s, and in 1991 his fashion pictures were included in a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, curated by the art historian Martin Harrison. The following year, his early black and white work was included in a book, The New York School: Photographs 1936-63, but, though a member of that esteemed circle – alongside Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Bruce Davidson, Levitt and Weegee – he was an outsider even among its disparate array of great talents.

It is his colour photographs of New York that matter. Mostly taken in and around the East Village neighbourhood where he lived, they are oblique and oddly intimate. He often photographed passersby through, or reflected in, windows. Frequently, the windows are steamed or grimy and the end results blurred, hazy and multi-layered. Passing cars and taxis are another motif, with a shadowy outline of the human figure or, in one memorable picture, a single hand visible inside. People are often glimpsed though slightly open doorways or partially concealed by pillars. His photographs of New York in the snow suggest a kind of opaque otherworld where everything and everyone is rendered indistinct. The warmth of Leiter's colours can give way to more faded tones, an effect that he achieved by intentionally using out-of-date Kodachrome film.

Just how daring Leiter's vision was can be measured in two early colour photographs. The first, made in 1950, is simply called T, and features the capital letter outlined boldly amid a wash of grey that is a steamed windowpane, through which is visible a pink shape that may just be the umbrella of a passing person. It could almost be an abstract painting. In a later photograph, Walk With Soames (1958), neon street lights and washes of colour stand out against a dark, looming building and the familiar outline of a traffic light against a light grey sky. A human figure is glimpsed in a blurred silhouette, but it is the shapes and colours that intrigue. Leiter was a singularly gifted photographer because he never stopped looking at life with a painter's eye for composition and abstraction.

The Soames of that title was his longtime friend, muse and lover, Soames Bantry, a model turned painter. She died in 2002. "Love comes and goes," he wrote in a short elegy to her. "Friendship is sometimes better, but not always … Our lives were intertwined … We stumbled though life together." They lived in the same building on separate floors and both experienced financial hardship.

A natural iconoclast and an artist who preferred being unknown to being famous, Leiter was a one-off. His photographs are the quiet, yet vibrant, products of his refined imagination and his ever-attentive eye. "I like it when one is not certain what one sees," he said. "When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion."

His brother Abba survives him.