An article I once read about detecting painting forgeries said that even the best forgers have contemporary painting mannerisms that get incorporated in their work. The forgery may initially be impossible to detect, but over time, as painting techniques change, the differences between the forged paintings and authentic ones become increasingly evident. Something similar but in reverse happens when time separates out the unique talents among a group of artists who at first seem homogeneous. “Saul Leiter: Women,” currently at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, helps to further clarify what distinguishes Mr. Leiter from the other New York School photographers with whom he is frequently identified.

In her authoritative “The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963” (1992), Jane Livingston includes Mr. Leiter among the 16 photographers she takes to be representative of the movement. Several of them — Weegee, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon — are easily distinguished from their peers, but Mr. Leiter’s style is not as determined as theirs, not as assertive, and so it takes a while to sort it out. That’s because what is most distinctive about his work is not any particular stylistic device, but his sensibility — a much more elusive quality. One of the pleasures of the present exhibition is the variety of his compositional and lighting arrangements, his ability to work in both black-and-white and color and still produce a Leiter image.

“Scarf” (1948) is one of the three pictures in the exhibition that is of a girl, rather than a mature woman. The girl wearing the printed scarf as a head covering is about 10, and, like subjects in so many pictures by New York School photographers, she was photographed candidly. Her head is in the middle of the picture, backlit by the glare off the cobblestone street. Around the central figure of the girl, pedestrians move in various directions. The legs of several of them are blurred, which gives them a sense of motion that contrasts with the girl, whose image is sharp and static. And although we see their bodies, none of their heads is visible, so they are anonymous, again unlike the central figure. The girl wears a sophisticated, smartly tailored coat, and her features, seen in profile, are quite pretty. The minor distinction that makes the picture characteristically a Leiter image is that the girl’s eyes — or, at least, the one we can see — are closed.

The fact that the girl’s eyes are closed gives a dreamlike quality to the picture, enhanced by the long shadows the other figures cast. Her body is bent just slightly forward, and her head turned slightly to the side. In Mr. Leiter’s composition, these minor details take on significance, so that happenstance seems fated, charmed. The end result is that the girl is lovely, and loveliness is one of the traits that mark off Mr. Leiter’s work from the urban grittiness of many of the other New York School photographers. It is not a cloying loveliness, mind you — it is even a somewhat ascetic loveliness — but it is loveliness.

The picture of “Joanna” (1947), the 4-year-old daughter of Mr. Leiter’s close friend, the abstract-expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, is also lovely — lovely in its simplicity. The tightly cropped shot of the back of her head focuses on the little ribbon tied in a bow to gather her hair. “Jean Pearson” (1948), a portrait of the aspiring actress whom Mr. Leiter’s friend W. Eugene Smith made the subject of a famous Life magazine photo-essay, is lovely in a soft-focus, Pictorialist way. The starkly black-and-white picture of Ms. Pearson’s face framed between her two hands is saved from being saccharine by the intense introspection Mr. Leiter’s picture shows. And the several nude photographs of exquisitely beautiful women are lovely in their reticence, the respect he has for their persons, even when they are photographed sleeping.

Mr. Leiter (b. 1923) came to New York in 1946 with the intention of being a painter, and he continued to paint after he began a career as a photographer. Much of his visual sense derives from his study of Vermeer, Picasso, and several Japanese masters of painting and printmaking. The Greenberg Gallery has up seven pictures in which the two media overlap; they are photographs painted with gouache and watercolor. There are also six of the commercial fashion photographs that provided him with a living. These are very accomplished, although they do not seem as interesting as the informal pictures he took mostly for his own pleasure. His talent was recognized quickly by his artist and photographer friends, and he had museum exposure as early as the “Always the Young Stranger” show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, but he says, “I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently.” The current interest in his work began with his inclusion in Jane Livingston’s book on the New York School, and an exhibition the following year, 1993, at Greenberg.

Which of the other New York School photographers would structure a picture around the bare shaft of a feather sticking up from a woman’s hat, “Feather” (1952)? Or could so deftly isolate a woman on the other side of the street seen across the traffic, “Hat” ( 1952)? Or could so casually meld the powerful beauty of the naked woman sleeping in a wicker chair on a screened porch with the grass, the parked auto, and the distant blue sea, “Lanesville” (1958)? And do it all with such delicacy that it looks easy?

wmmeyers@nysun.com

Until June 21 (41 E. 57th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-334-0010).