The news that Rudy Burckhardt had ended his life last year, aged eighty-five, was startling and saddening. It seemed impossible that the small, vital, bearded man with the bemused expression would no longer be part of the New York art world, that he would no longer be turning his exacting, but oddly dispassionate gaze on the most unlikely—and sometimes the most seemingly obvious—parts of his adopted, much-loved city. (“What I love about New York,” Burckhardt once said, “is that it just grew up wildly”—this in contrast to his native Basel, which he described as “lonely and empty and proper and clean.”) It was easier to think that he was simply spending longer than usual at his house in Maine, where he had been scrutinizing bark and leaves with the same attention that in the city he accorded urban roofscapes, building façades, and shoals of pedestrians. Yet the news also provoked admiration. Burckhardt’s having made death a choice—while still fully able to make that choice—his turning the inevitable into an act of will, rather than of passive acceptance, seemed to be both courageous and, curiously, just what one might expect of someone as thought- ful, self-effacing, and fiercely independent-minded as this remarkable photographer, filmmaker, and painter.

Burckhardt long enjoyed a reputation as one of New York’s secret treasures—his friend the poet John Ashbery called him a “subterranean monument”—prized for his wit and his perceptions by those who knew him well, and admired from a distance by those captivated by