The big picture: André Kertész’s window on New York city life

The photographer André Kertész chose his New York apartment carefully. Born in Hungary in 1894, Kertész served in the first world war, and lived and worked in Paris until 1936 when, with the Nazi threat spreading across Europe, he and his wife Elizabeth exiled themselves to the States. He brought with him many ideas from friends in the French avant garde who had included Man Ray and Piet Mondrian – in particular a revolutionary understanding of composition, of the cubist possibilities of light and shade. When he and Elizabeth looked for an apartment in Greenwich Village in 1952, the view from the window was all important.

The building they chose, at 2 Fifth Avenue, was empty at the time, and partly under construction; Kertész went through every apartment to find the optimum vantage from which to photograph. The flat he chose, on the 12th floor, was where he lived until his death in 1985, aged 91. Some of his defining pictures were taken from its window and from the roofs of neighbouring blocks. This image, made in 1978, was typical of his feel for architecture, for the accidental drama of geometric planes in relation to one another. The angles of roof extensions and fire escapes gestured toward abstraction, but characteristically the composition was rooted in reality by the figure of the sunbather, hidden from the streets below. The young woman appears to have abandoned her paperwork for the day, to concentrate on her tan.

The picture is included in a forthcoming auction of the personal collection of the British photographer Dorothy Bohm, who died last year aged 98. Bohm had got to know Kertész from visits to New York in the 1970s. This print was a gift to her, and Kertész’s understanding of the possibilities of shadow and texture in unexpected places, inspired some of her own later work.