Andre Kertesz’s Photos From His Window

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/lens/andre-kerteszs-photos-from-his-window.html

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Perched inside his apartment 12 stories above Washington Square Park, Andre Kertesz beheld a cityscape of trees, rooftops and snow-covered paths. Caught between distance and intimacy, his images revealed with affection and longing a Hungarian émigré who was an outsider in his adopted land.

“There is a kind of psychological component to it,” Robert Gurbo, his estate’s curator, told Lens in 2015, “where he is clearly looking to see what they have to see, what he has never had.”

His desire for a room with a view led him and his wife, Elizabeth, in 1952 to the Greenwich Village apartment whose vistas offered a panoply of light, lines, shadows and textures. An exhibit of that work opens today at Bruce Silverstein Gallery.

“When he moved into 2 Fifth Avenue, the building was vacant and under construction and he went through every apartment looking for a specific vantage point that he would be able to photograph from,” Mr. Gurbo told Lens. “He chose the 12th floor and he said it was because it was far away enough that it would flatten the field and create archetypal photographs, but close enough that he could get involved in the intimacy from below.”

Washington Square Park’s trees and paths marked the change of seasons, while the skyline had the no-nonsense flavor of postwar New York, before sharp-angled steel and glass towers began soaring ever higher. Some images are rendered in quick, visual strokes: shadows on a brick wall contrasted against a skeletal tree, or snowfall reducing a scene to a sketchlike abstraction.

It’s hard to behold the past knowing what befell the subject of one image he took in 1976. It shows two buildings dwarfing the landscape, encircled by a gauzy wreath of smoke. In the foreground, a cross juts into the frame. Behind that, the Twin Towers. It reminds us we are all outsiders, each looking at a spectral memory through our own, individual windows.

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