OTTO E. NELSON

NELSON--Otto E., 1908-2013. Otto Nelson, esteemed photographer of fine art, whose clients included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society, Japan Society, the Sackler and Freer Museums, and the private collections of David Rockefeller, Mary Burke and Malcolm Forbes died peacefully on November 17, of natural causes. He was 105. Nelson was renowned for the intelligence and respect with which he captured the objects and people he recorded, and for the simple elegance of his photographs. Throughout his long career, his beloved wife Marguerite did the printing, and the feisty photographer and his ever-gracious, Alsatian partner charmed their clients, family and friends as both bohemian couple and team. Born in Freiburg, Germany in the tumultuous years preceding the first World War, Nelson's career was shaped by art school in Berlin and years in Paris, where he fled Hitler and met his wife, and by their narrow and difficult escape to Switzerland and emigration to the U.S. With the help of friends and relatives, they settled in New York and established Nelson's career as a professional photographer. Before cultivating his niche in Asian, Islamic, and Ancient western art, Nelson photographed for a number of private schools and labor unions. He also photographed contemporary art in the Sixties, working for the Betty Parsons, Emmerich and Sydney Janis galleries, and sustaining longer relationships with such artists as Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, Wallase Ting and Nell Blaine. A lifelong dedicatee of classical music and opera, he also made a series of portraits of such luminaries as Nathan Milstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Toscanini, and the famed Spanish pianist, Alicia de la Rocha. A highlight of his career was an invitation in the late Sixties to photograph in the famed Topkapi palace, in a library untouched for hundreds of years. Nelson had no children. He is survived by his niece, Ruth Norden, her daughter, Linda, and grandchildren, Luke and Alec Joyner, and by extended family in the UK, France and Israel, all of whom will miss him dearly.