To provide a silver salt heat developable photosensitive material having high sensitivity and low fogging and excellent in illuminance irregularity properties, image light resistance and silver tone, to provide a method for preparing an organic solvent dispersion of a photosensitive silver halide emulsion containing a photosensitive silver halide used for the silver salt heat developable photosensitive material, and to provide an image forming method using the silver salt heat developable photosensitive material.

The silver salt heat developable photosensitive material includes an image forming layer containing a photosensitive silver halide, a non-photosensitive fatty acid silver salt, a reducing agent and a binder on at least one surface of a support, wherein the photosensitive silver halide is a surface latent image type in exposure and converts to an internal latent image type after heat development, and the image forming layer contains a copolymer having two monomers of a specific structure as constituent units.