The delicate Polaroids by André Kertész, produced in the last years of his life from the window of his Manhattan apartment, were presented in dialogue with the large format, painterly prints by Arne Svenson who, 35 years later, also photographed from his Manhattan apartment window.

New York city, 1979: aged 84, André Kertész was emotionally and physically exhausted after the recent death of his beloved wife and lifelong companion Elizabeth. To distract him from his grief, a friend offered him a Polaroid SX-70 camera and, for the next 6 years, the master of black and white photography used it to produce a last great body of work. Taken in his Manhattan apartment just north of Washington Square, many of the photographs were shot either from his window or on the windowsill. Arranging personal objects into delicate, crafted still lives that evoked his love for Elizabeth, Kertész found solace in the little camera and its immediate color prints in which amateurs of his celebrated black and white photography would recognize certain compositional features; nuances of light, form and depth of field, and occasional references to his earlier ‘distortions’.

New York city, 2012: 33 years later, a younger Arne Svenson would also work from his Manhattan apartment window, recording the living tableaux in the apartments opposite whose window frames were like stage wings with actors ceaselessly entering and leaving the scene. Svenson never photographed faces, preferring a choreography of nameless, archetypal bodies and their interplay with the architecture framing them: the turn of a head, the graceful arc of a hand, the human form barely discernable behind tall curtains. Entitled ‘The Neighbors’, the series was published in 2015 with a preface by David Ebony.