Web Pages by Lloyd Spencer
On 20 September 1962, in New York, after all those long years of snubs and slights, Kertész took a photograph that summarized his own situation – or his own perception of his situation – perfectly [36]. Near the top of the frame two women are seated on a bench; in the distance is scattered an assortment of empty chairs and benches. A third of the frame is completely dominated by the back of a man in an overcoat looking down at a broken park bench. It is quite possible that after enough knocks and disappointments your favourite bench in a park could mean almost as much to you as a pet dog or a wife once did. Pathetic? That’s the point: how sad it is that there are people for whom a bench could mean the difference between melancholy and breakdown. ‘Think of being them,’ Larkin urged:
Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
No friends but empty chairs . . .
Philip Larkin
And now the bench is not just empty, but broken. Etymologically, it would make sense if the man with his back to the camera were a recently declared bankrupt (banca rotta) but, equally, he could be just a passer-by, looking at it quizzically. If, to put it crudely, Kertész wanted the broken bench to reflect the observer’s dilapidation, he also saw – and saw himself as – someone looking on, curious, sympathetic but detached. It is this telescoped ambiguity that contrives to save the picture from the sentimentality it courts. I say ‘contrives’ because the photograph was not the happy – in the Kertészian sense of ‘unhappy’ – accident that it appears. Kertész’s wife, Elizabeth, had met and taken under her wing a mentally unstable young woman who had to be committed to a hospital. The two women in the background are Elizabeth and the patient. The man with his back to the camera is Frank Thomas, Elizabeth’s partner in the cosmetics business that provided the bulk of the Kertészs’ income during the long years when André’s photographic vision was unwanted, wasted. By the time this photograph was taken Thomas had become totally reliant on the Kertészs because – like the accordionist André had photographed on 6th Avenue in 1959 – he was blind. Presumably Kertész and his friends happened upon the bench and Kertész then arranged things to give the picture the symbolic association he wanted.
Web Pages by Lloyd Spencer 