In framing the still life he had created, André lined up Triumph on the Gallows on the left edge, side by side with Hecht’s Perfidy. Why foreground Holocaust and post-Holocaust books in a self-portrait in absence from 1970 America? Ceremonies took place in New York that year to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other death camps. One can speculate that they rekindled the grief, horror, and outrage André must have felt yet never publicly revealed. Perversely, he would have also intended an analogy between his treatment in the United States and the martyrdom of European Jews. Perfidy is the self-image of a man who claimed that he would rather be murdered in Paris than cut dead by the American photography world.[23]

  * * *

  —

  That April, sixty-nine-year-old Rogi André died in Paris. She had been living in a third-floor walkup in a derelict building on the Left Bank. Besides André’s name, Rogi had taken from her marriage a creative practice as a portrait photographer. In the decade after he left her, she could be seen lugging around her battered and outmoded equipment: a tripod, lights, boxes of glass plates, and a Voigtländer Bergheil or Voigtländer Alpin circa 1912. The latter she had borrowed from André and never returned. Rogi made portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Colette, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Dora Maar, Alberto Giacometti, Django Reinhardt, Peggy Guggenheim, and scores of others — a cultural pantheon of interwar France. Picasso reportedly deemed her “the very great Rogi André.”[24] How she convinced such luminaries to surrender to what the painter Fernand Léger described as her “chamber for spontaneous confessions,” no one knows.[25] Rogi’s process was distinctly her own. Flouting the modernist concern for medium purity, she slipped painting into photography. Subtly brushing out or heightening certain details on her negatives, she effected a tenuous strangeness. Few people noticed. If someone did, she’d respond, “It’s better that way.”[26]

  As the Nazis approached Paris in 1940, Rogi had fled to the unoccupied zone. Later she returned to the capital to accept a gallerist friend’s offer of a room in a little house set back from the street, where she, a Jew, could keep to herself. Yet she reportedly picked up some cash by taking portraits of German soldiers. After the war, she did little photography—nobody wanted her pictures, she ranted — but continued to paint. She became frail and wraithlike with wispy hair crimped 1930s style and thin lips painted dark red. She seemed profoundly alone.

  André had news of Rogi over the years. One conduit was his old friend Pierre Gassmann, the owner of Picto. When the two got together in New York or Paris, André would slip Gassmann some cash for his legal wife. Romeo Martinez was another go-between. Still unhappy that Rogi had kept his Voigtländer Alpin, André reportedly leaned on Martinez to recover it for him. That never happened. Now Martinez was attempting to raise money to buy Rogi a tombstone. Fearing that his name would be associated with hers, André refused to contribute.[27]

  Over the years, the cost of André’s secret would have been less financial than psychological. He implied that he had devoted himself exclusively to Elizabeth from the day they met, and he pretended that his marriage to Rogi never happened. Elizabeth probably never found out that André had not divorced. He would have lived nearly four decades with a need for self-justification and a low-level yet persistent fear that the facts would surface. Rogi’s death must have left him hoping that he could put all that behind him.

  Rogi left no will and no known heirs. Her belongings were hauled to the sidewalk for garbage collection. Her photographs, however, went to an auction house where the Bibliothèque Nationale curator of prints and photography Jean-Claude Lemagny purchased them for the institution.[28] Lemagny had begun assembling a world-class collection of contemporary photographs and was preparing to launch the Bibliothèque Nationale’s first photography gallery.

  * * *

  —

  In the United States, the fine-art photography world was evolving faster. At Light Gallery, eyebrow-raising pictures by then-unknowns Stephen Shore, Bea Nettles, and Robert Mapplethorpe shared the walls with pictures by established photographers like Paul Strand and Arnold Newman. Openings were heady affairs where shaggy kids with cameras around their necks mingled with collectors and connoisseurs. The doors would swing open, and in would walk the curator Sam Wagstaff, the actress Diane Keaton, the writer Janet Malcolm, or the architect and philanthropist Phyllis Lambert. Cornell Capa came to everything. Photographic legends like Ansel Adams showed up on occasion. André was viewed as a living legend, too, and a “big deal” — albeit a tetchy one.[29]

  One day in the spring of 1973 found him especially so. When Tennyson Schad handed him a check for $820, his first-quarter earnings from Light, André paused and stared at it for a moment. His hands trembled. “Something must be wrong. I thought it would be much higher.”

  Schad explained that the gallery had sold considerably more work than that check represented. Everything had been billed, but many purchasers hadn’t yet paid.

  André replied that he always required payment at the time of the sale. Why was he selling through a gallery? He could have done better himself. And what about his portfolios? Sales had been sluggish, Schad admitted, but Light intended to market the portfolios more aggressively.[30]

  Over the months that followed, André’s portfolio sales did pick up, and sales of his single prints skyrocketed. Satiric Dancer hit the sweet spot. Priced at $250 each (later $450), prints flew out the door. The photorealist artist Chuck Close bought one. So did the photography critic Andy Grundberg.[31] For those who mythologized les années folles, Satiric Dancer put a finger on a moment of “Shalimar perfume and champagne and Paris nights with no mornings,” thought the Light staffer Irene Borger.[32] Others saw not bohemian glamour but female empowerment. The women’s movement was gaining momentum, and the human body had become a favored site for creative experimentation, variously labeled body art, performance art, or feminist art. Magda Förstner’s unshaved underarms, bobbed hair, decorum-flouting minidress, and look of joyful abandon made her a feminist sister.

  André’s mostly unloved photographs of female bodies, the Distortions, were also about to come to the fore. After his ballyhooed glass negatives from the trunk arrived in New York in 1964, André had realized the full extent of their damage. Many were broken, and most badly oxidized. André had contacted Kodak and other experts to inquire about restoration, but no one could guarantee that their process would not cause further damage. Besides, restoration would cost thousands of dollars. Finding no practical solution, André put the negatives aside, his fairy-tale account of recovered treasure missing its happily ever after.

  From time to time, he fulminated about the situation. Brendan Gill was among those who listened. A writer for The New Yorker, Gill was a consummate urbanite and journalistic lion. He and André had developed a friendship after Nicolas Ducrot hired Gill to write an introduction to André’s Washington Square. Gill was both amused and annoyed by André’s moaning about “the perpetually rising sea of troubles that daily — or hourly, or even from one moment to the next — threatened to engulf him.” The writer suggested a solution to the restoration problem. Why not apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship? André could use the money to restore the negatives.

  That would be useless, André flung back. The Guggenheim people would laugh at him. “Do something nice for a man in his eighties? Forget it! That’s how life is. Yunnerstan?”

  Not necessarily, thought Gill. So he and Ducrot wrote the application and persuaded the naysayer to sign. For letters of recommendation, they turned to John Szarkowski and New York Times chief art critic Hilton Kramer, who had reviewed André’s Hallmark show and proclaimed him a genius.

  “Months passed and André squeezed the last drop of sour pleasure out of the silence that had ensued,” Gill reports. “What had he told me? Hadn’t I known that money doesn’t grow on trees?”

  Then a letter arrived: André had a Guggenheim. He would get $15,000. “The first time, yunnerstan?”[33]

  André’s bent for gloom notwithstanding, the sun kept shining on the restoration project, thanks to his neighbor Wolf von dem Bussche. The German-born photographer lived with his wife and son two floors above the Kertészes. Von dem Bussche had been an art history student at Columbia until André persuaded him to ditch the scholarly life and devote himself to photography. André taught his neighbor how to use a camera and urged him to concentrate on his immediate surroundings. He too would take classic photographs of Washington Square.

  Von dem Bussche now introduced André to Gerd Sander, the grandson of the early twentieth-century German photographic portraitist August Sander. Gerd had developed techniques for restoring his grandfather’s glass-plate negatives. He agreed to do the same for André’s and make backups using Kodak SO-015 film.

  With that process underway, Ducrot turned to nettling, begging, and arguing with Elizabeth, who took a dim view of the Distortions and was balking at the idea of a book. But Ducrot stood firm, and so did André. Elizabeth eventually relented. So it was settled: Kramer would write the introduction, and Knopf would publish. Sander in his darkroom in Maryland, then Bakht in his darkroom in Manhattan, were exhorted to hurry. André’s excitement was palpable.[34]

  Not every plate in the trunk was a Distortion. Soon after the shipment arrived in 1964, André had pulled out a negative with an unremarkable view of Paris rooftops. He took it in 1929 to test a Telepeconar lens, a primitive zoom. By the time it arrived in New York, the plate had a hole in it, as if it had been pierced by a pebble but somehow not shattered. Cracks projected from the hole like the rays in a child’s drawing of the sun. A mediocre picture, a cracked plate: Most people would have tossed it. But André and Bakht stabilized the plate by taping the edges, then sandwiching it between two sheets of glass, and made a print.[35]

  At a careless first glance, Broken Plate looks like a picture of a broken window. But no: The inside of the hole is pitch-black. The window never existed. André uses his damaged negative to pull off a Wizard of Oz moment, drawing back the curtain on the illusion that a photograph is a window on the world.

  In looking at any photograph, viewers tacitly agree to certain conventions. If the photograph is a cityscape like this one by André, they see depth, even though they know they are looking at a flat sheet of paper. In Broken Plate, the blackness inside the hole keeps the viewer’s eyes on that flat surface, undermining the pictorial illusion of an urban scene. André’s photograph reads as both a camera-made view of buildings (the illusion) and a sheet of photographic paper that’s been placed under cracked glass and exposed to light in an enlarger (the material reality).

  Considered symbolically, it recalls André’s loss of Paris and all it represented. The hole suggests a stray bullet. That life had been shattered, leaving only a void. “Mon Paris,” André kept sighing.[36]

  * * *

  —

  Twenty months after André agreed to exclusivity with Light Gallery, the matter of renewal pressed. But André kept resisting. One June day, he and Schad sat down to resolve their differences.

  André began. “So I have been a bad boy?”

  Light’s staff had discovered that he was in talks with the Carleton Gallery in Ottawa about showing his color work. That violated his lapsed contract.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Schad said that André had hurt everyone’s feelings by going behind their backs. He’d acted unfairly.

  André listened patiently for a time, then boiled over. He had never been unfair! The Carleton Gallery had inquired about exhibiting his color photographs, in which Light had never shown the slightest interest. André had not said yes. (The show never happened.)

  “So am I a bad boy?”

  His real issue, it emerged, was Schad’s failure to promote, place, and sell his work as André thought fitting. As the two spoke, André’s pictures hung at both MoMA (in a three-person exhibition with the photographic giants Aleksandr Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy) and the New York Historical Society (in Manhattan Now, a group show that moved the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable to laud André’s “special genius” and describe him as a photographer who had “mastered all of the difficult insights and responses that add up to recognition of the city’s soul.”[37]). Not bad. Yet, in André’s view, Schad had never capitalized on his prestige.

  “Is it possible that the Ansel Adams show at the Metropolitan has his goat?” Schad wondered.[38] The Met’s exhibition of one hundred and fifty-six Adams photographs was drawing adoring crowds and consuming critical attention.

  Schad reached over to touch André’s hand, expecting a warm response. Instead, he saw the sweetness drain from the photographer’s face. André spoke faster and louder, berating Light for not using “publicity gimmicks.” He had in mind “The Greatest People in Town,” a feature in New York magazine naming him one of the city’s treasures. The illustration, a composite portrait of eighty-nine New Yorkers, showed him next to the baseball legend Willie Mays.[39] That feature thrilled André because it showed that he belonged, that he was respected, that he stood “at the top of his profession.” Yet Schad had done nothing with it, and that rankled. No wonder he wasn’t selling more. Light was the wrong place for his work.

  It was the dealer’s turn to get angry. The feature in New York had nothing to do with selling photographs, he riposted. The general public didn’t buy photographs. Collectors and museums did. Cultivating them was an art. André looked tired, Schad noted. He kept repeating himself.

  Over lunch, their conversation shifted to Schad’s interest in making a bulk purchase of André’s work. Earlier that spring, he and Fern had met with André and Elizabeth to sketch out a plan that would guarantee the Kertészes an income for life and keep André’s images safe and visible long into the future. No sooner were the words out of Tennyson’s mouth than Elizabeth interrupted: “We don’t need the money.”[40]

  But they did need a plan, she agreed. Now Schad brought up the idea again. André listened, then requested more specifics. He too had been pondering the future. He spoke of doing a definitive print of each important image before it was too late. Light might be able to fund such a project, Schad replied. They left it at that, with André still wrought up about gimmicks.

  Two weeks later, Schad supplied the details. He was putting together a syndicate to buy photographs from the world’s greatest photographers, he confided. The photographs would be held for at least five years, then made available for purchase by museums, universities, and selected other collectors. In André’s case, he proposed to acquire five thousand photographs — ten prints each of five hundred negatives—with payments to extend over several years, giving André an annual income and lightening the tax burden of a figure “well in excess of $100,000.” Such an arrangement would not only bring in good money for both André and Light Gallery but also preserve André’s work for generations. André could, of course, continue selling his pictures as usual.[41]

  So things stood three weeks later when André and Elizabeth departed for Asia. How would André’s work be preserved after his death? Where would it be stored? Who would manage it and work to extend his legacy? The questions remained unanswered. André and Elizabeth had no children to pick up the burden.

  * * *

  —

  Their trip to Asia was a prearranged tour booked by Elizabeth. At seventy-two, she shared André’s intensified awareness of mortality. This pause in her professional life would last five weeks in all.

  Following a few days in San Francisco, they flew to Japan, then traveled to Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Bali, Australia, Fiji, Tahiti, and Hawaii. Their accommodations were high-end, yet most left much to be desired. Or so Elizabeth thought. Only one hotel, near the dormant volcano Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii, earned her undiluted approval. It was there that André photographed her on their balcony. Elizabeth wore a kimono-style wrap as she sat writing. Her right hand held a pen; her left shielded her eyes from the sun but also from André’s lens. He angled around, questing for images that would meld feeling and form. It’s easy to imagine Elizabeth shooting him an exasperated look and a half-laughing command (“Stop it, Bandi”) as she did when he danced too much attendance upon her.[42]

  Sensitive about aging (witness her lies about her birth year), Elizabeth disliked being photographed, a trait André claimed to find charming. He did photograph her but took care to shoot from a distance or, as in Mauna Kea (also known as Mauna Kea #7), make sure that her face was obscured. For viewers of his photographs in future years, he would gallantly keep her forever young.[43]

  To take Mauna Kea, André positioned himself above and slightly to the side of Elizabeth with the bright sun behind him.[44] That canted view draws attention to her distancing gesture, emphasized by the crosshatching shadow of the balcony’s railing. On the blank wall beyond are their shadows, André’s recognizably that of a photographer with camera in hand. A shadow-puppet play seems about to unfold. Yet Mauna Kea does not tell a story. Whatever insight it offers about the couple’s relationship is by contrast. André is literally absent yet emotionally present; Elizabeth is physically present yet emotionally elsewhere.