“The camera is my tool. Through it I give reason to everything around me”
~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)
Andre and his wife Elizabeth moved into a modest apartment overlooking Washington Square Park in 1952. This was to be his home for the rest of his life. It had a high vantage point on the 12th Floor and he often used a telephoto lens to create a fore shortened effect. The apartment sorted his later life personality. In his earlier career he was an acknowledged artist as great as many of his contemporaries and friends amongst them Mondrian, Calder, Chagall, and Brassai. In his American years he felt overlooked and forgotten and he started to emotionally withdraw from the world. This is one of his most beautiful and important photographs. In many ways it is a self portrait. I think he relates deeply to the isolated man in the snow with such pathos and feeling and a similar sense of loneliness and detachment from the everyday urban life of a city he could never bring himself to really call “home.”
