For two years, Kathleen Nathan gazed through her Brooklyn apartment windows and from her
rooftop terrace, at the monolithic structure that was once the Williamsburgh Savings Bank
Building. The Romanesque style tower, built in 1929, was converted to condominium
apartments six years ago. Like Alfred Stieglitz, who pointed his camera toward New York’s high
rise architecture from the windows of his American Place gallery, Nathan has observed the
changing light and contrast of this tower, along with other nearby buildings, often
photographing how the character of the skyscraper changed through the shifting patterns and
color of light. In this exhibition, one of those photographs of the tower is included. The
brickwork of her apartment is seen on the left, while on the right, an abstraction of the tower
prismatically floats on the window glass. The sides are divided by a shaft of blue color.

Windows as mirrors is a visual motif often used by Nathan in her other works, where
questions of transparency and reflection are explored. Some of those photographs are lyrical
and layered with image. The photographs exhibited here, while poetically composed, are
literal or straight images of real places that exist outside of her apartment. The buildings of
her Brooklyn neighborhood are brought inside through their reflection onto the surface of the
windows; the transparent glass becomes the silvered reflective surface. Using photographic
techniques of selective focus and close up framing, some through long focal length lenses, the
photographs are both documents of an outside world, but also reflective of the inside worlds
of the apartment and her own feelings of melancholy at the time they were made. Pensive
feelings of solitude guided the making of the pictures. As Nathan muses, she was “detached
and isolated like the people in an Edward Hopper painting.” That reference is near literal as in
the photograph of a red façade that is inverted and sharpened by a large lens on a grill of her
window.

In 1978, John Szarkowski, then Director of Photography at MOMA, curated a significant
exhibition titled, Windows and Mirrors. The theoretical themes and underpinnings in that
show parallel many of Nathan’s. He wrote then, as we can see now in this exhibition, that
photography is “the pursuit of beauty: that formal integrity that pays homage to the dream of
a meaningful life.” A life that is lived inside, but is inspired by the outside.