Saul Leiter American, 3/12/1923–26/11/2013

A café table, shot from across it and slightly above. On the marble top: a chrome soda siphon in its wire mesh, a small brown jug, an espresso cup on its saucer, a rolled newspaper. Beyond the table, bent low over her work with a pen in her hand, a woman with red hair in a pale jacket, writing. Behind her a big cream-coloured heater with louvred vents. Further back, cane bistro chairs, another red-haired woman with her chin on her hand, and past all of that a blurred awning with red letters on it and the street going by.

The picture is built in about six planes and only one of them is sharp. Leiter worked in colour for decades before anybody thought that was serious, and the reason his colour has lasted is that he never used it to describe anything. The cream of the heater, the red of the hair, the red of the awning and the red of a coat thrown over a chair are placed at intervals through the depth of the frame like notes.

Nobody is aware of him. The woman writing has her head down and is not going to lift it. The whole photograph has been taken across a tabletop belonging to somebody else, past a siphon belonging to somebody else, in a café where the photographer is at most a man who has ordered a coffee. It was made from about two feet away by somebody nobody looked up at.