In 1946, Saul Leiter moved into an apartment that occupied the entire floor of a building on New York’s Lower East Side. One of the finest photographers of a golden generation that also included Diane Arbus and William Eggleston, for the next 60 years Leiter used the warren-like space as both home and studio, rarely venturing more than a block or so beyond its front door. 

From the 1950s, he was joined by his “friend”, Soames Bantry, a fashion model who shared his love of art. He liked to sit under the skylight, he said, “cup of coffee or wine in hand, and watch her paint”.

If that seems a little indulgent, know that Leiter was fond of underplaying his work. “I aspired to be unimportant,” he once said, adding with his customary humour that when he is “making spaghetti at three in the morning, and realise that I don’t have the proper sauce for it, fame is of no use.” In fact, by the time he died in 2013 – he was 89 – the apartment was crammed with his paintings, photographs, upwards of 60,000 colour slides and tens of thousands of unprinted negatives. When he had warned his close friends, near the end, that “the world had only seen the tip of the iceberg”, he wasn’t joking.

Some of these long-hidden images can be seen for the first time in a new book, Forever Saul Leiter. They include private photographs that Leiter made of both Bantry and his younger sister, Deborah, who inspired some of his early experiments, but who suffered from an unspecified mental illness in her 20s and was committed permanently to an institution.