Ogni pittore dipinge sé

An Encounter

For more than thirty years now I have been bound to meet Benjamin Katz at openings by those artists he admires. With his old-world elegance – he seems to have walked straight out of a pre-war Lubitsch film, – he speaks perfect French with the hint of an accent that I have never been able to identify, although he himself claims he comes from Brussels. And the German in which he has always expressed himself is so sophisticated that he takes care to befog it with a thick French accent. He is a man for whom nuances exist only if they are infinitesimal and the evident only if it is half-hidden.  […]
As he collected his photographs together, there arose, from one picture to the next, an astonishing geometry that links the light and shade. Everywhere the same concentration and reserve are displayed in the organisation of the image that situate the viewer on the side of art and of the artist. It needs to be understood that these splendid prints all exist in the service of a cause that is none other than an art that he expresses with a dazzling combination of decency and transparency that is so difficult to attain.
Thus, Benjamin Katz’s photographs are so much more than is commonly thought, much more than that rather facile category of the artist portrait. Through his eye, they record a truth to which, like his artists, he aspires. He shows art as it appears only up close, near the works and near the artists – art seen from above.