I really did enjoy the video. Well done, music, tone, pace and all. I had to pause it to see some of his images on another site so I can get a sense of what his work was like. Not sure I am any further ahead. It looks rather eclectic, and I take it, represents some of the first color work of the era. The ones I am familiar with are Ernst Haas and Elliot Porter.
JR
Haas is really rather different, in that he is more the magazine photographer when he does colour - or at least, that's my perception. What I mean by that, is that his work tends to be more crisp and a little distanced - as if he is observing rather than feeling. Where Leiter seems to become a part of the flux, I do not feel that with Haas very much; for example, some shots made from inside cars, where he brings an immediacy by framing the interest in side mirrors and so on, devices that do concentrate the gaze exactly where the photographer wants the gaze to go, which is a bit more of a didactic process than one that simply appeals to some sense of common, spiritual connection with the shape of what is, if you care to notice it.
Porter, in my limited knowledge of him, comes across as a landscape guy, which I don't think ever interested Leiter, unless one equates his city pix with the concept of urban landscape.
Helen Levitt also did a body of city colour - perhaps more around people than does Leiter. From what I can gather (or interpret - dangerous!), Leiter strikes me as rather shy, genuinely, not as an affectation that can happen with people finding themselves in the public gaze. As such, I don't think he'd have been given to doing "street" in the sense of shooting random strangers very much, unless from a distance, such as from a bridge or whatever. Such shyness does not necessarily mean that it exists in private life - perhaps the reverse: he shot a lot of what, in my view, are not particularly romantic pictures of the women in his life with their bits on show. Not much high art there, I don't think. Is it an act of love doing that? Is there a little bit of meanness, an eye on the future?
Leiter's "amateur" work is what I grew to think of as "street art", as compared with the work of anybody else; almost all of the famous names in street appear to me to be quite corrosive, certainly intrusive. There are exceptions, of course, such as HC-B who, for me, fits into yet another category of street to anybody else: this one is not so much a genre based on style, as of sometimes political motivation and observation of the human condition...
I would like to return to this theme some time, but now is the time to exit for lunch!
;-)