All the cities Suschitzky has ever lived in have been by the water, Vienna on the Danube, Amsterdam on the Amstel River, London on the Thames; he has been living here for more than fourty years, in Maida Vale, with a view of the canal of Little Venice. In the Dutch capital, it is the reflexes and abstract reflections in the water of Prinsengracht that fascinate him. In India he photographs people wading through a dried-up riverbed underneath a bridge, in the desert a camel working a bucket wheel, toiling to pump up the precious resource.
For the faithful in Benares, bathing in the Ganges is as natural a thing as mass being celebrated in Notre Dame de Paris. Like the finger of God, the French cathedral’s tower, which Suschitzky first climbed in 1939, rises into the sky: “Very many years later I went to an exhibition of photographs by Henri Cartier- Bresson and saw an identical view of the Seine taken from the same spot. I had taken mine years earlier, and Henri’s picture lacked the barge on the river.” Sometimes the water comes unexpectedly, from above. A view down from one of the medieval towers of San Gimignano shows tourists taking shelter from a sudden deluge in an otherwise usually sunny Tuscany. A resident of London Zoo, on the other hand, thirsts for nothing but the jet of fresh water splashing into the basin after it was emptied for cleaning.