In New York, the world in miniature passes right before your window. No one understood this quite so well as the Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész, best known for his morphed 1930s black-and-white nudes and moody Paris cityscapes. André Kertész: The Polaroids (Norton; $35), chronicles his final, and perhaps most private, body of work—a collection of curious, abstracted images of life flickering at the window of his Washington Square apartment. After losing his wife, Elizabeth, to lung cancer in 1977, the artist locked himself indoors with a Polaroid SX-70 (a gift from musician friend Graham Nash) as well as a small glass bust whose outline reminded him of her. Kertész first situated this object alone on his windowsill, and later alongside assorted household objects, prompting a series of luminous still lifes, filled with longing, that serve as metaphors for his more than 40 years with Elizabeth. These delicate images, full of watercolor light and still rarely seen, offered Kertész personal healing and artistic rejuvenation at the age of 85. As his final creations, they also suggest a tender goodbye.
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