As Josef Sudek, André Kertész also photographed objects on a windowsill. After his wife Elizabeth’s death in 1977, he began placing objects that reminded him of her or of their life together in front of the window of his New York apartment and shooting color Polaroids of them. The series was eventually collected in a book called From My Window........
Now the city became a soft, distant backdrop for his miniature theater of memory. Buildings are distorted through the glass bust of a woman: a smooth, fluid, featureless shape like a pooling teardrop..........
Kertész eventually bought a second, identical glass bust and posed the two in a pool of sun, leaning their heads together in a mute tête-à-tête. It’s no surprise that glass—in windowpanes, wine glasses, marbles, sculptures, shards—is the star of both Sudek’s and Kertész’s still lifes: it gathers, refracts, and solidifies light, the real subject of every photograph. The camera lens is another glass window, which lets us see into the past but shuts us out.
“André Kertész is possibly the most photographic of all photographers: he sought out the play of light and shadow; he liked the concentration and overlapping of forms, of moments; and in the everyday, in banality, he recognized poetry, beauty, and even, for all his innate modesty, the “sublime.” (text from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website)
