André Kertész

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Kertész, André (1894-1985), Hungarian-born American photographer. He always said that he was ‘born a photographer’, but his gift for composition and for seeing the curious juxtapositions that the camera can record so well must have been acquired during his sojourn in Paris (1925-36), where he experienced Surrealism and all the other modernisms in the heady atmosphere of Montparnasse. He encouraged (and taught) Brassaï to take up the medium and photograph the nocturnal world. By the early 1930s, Julien Levy was describing him as ‘the prolific leader in the new documentary school of photography’. Through the publication of his pictures in the leading magazines of the day, he inspired the younger generation of French and émigré photographers with a style of photography that linked, as Cartier-Bresson would later say, ‘the eye, the hand and the heart’. His style, and in particular the lyrical and poetic modernism that his photographs display, powerfully influenced French humanist photography, a visual perspective that became almost ubiquitous by the 1950s.

A gifted amateur before moving to Paris to find work in his chosen profession in 1925, Kertész developed a lyrical form of New Vision modernism in his work for the emergent illustrated press. Although he worked in other formats, it was the visual freedom offered by the new Leica 35 mm camera that best revealed his ability, although he also experimented with distortion and photographic effects. His publications on children (1933) and Paris (1934) pioneered the new genre of the photographic book. Moving to New York in 1936, he remained an editorial photographer for the rest of his career. After retirement he continued to photograph, and was ‘rediscovered’ towards the end of his life.

When Beaumont Newhall was assembling his historic MoMA exhibition Photography 1839-1937 (1937), he asked Kertész for some prints. The latter proposed his series of distorted nudes, published to great acclaim in France in 1933. Newhall, with ascetic New Englander zeal, insisted that if shown they would have to be cropped to exclude the pubic hair. Kertész reluctantly agreed, but held it against Newhall ever after: as he ruefully recalled, ‘This was my welcome to America’—a country that seemed to ignore his talents. The Keystone agency, which offered him the job that took him to New York, made him do studio work, when his forte was the street, the ‘circumstantial magic’ of the decisive moment (practised well before Cartier-Bresson), seized with a small camera. Much of his Paris work during the heyday of modernism, 1925-36, had been made for the leading illustrated magazines of the era such as Vu and Art et médecine. Virtually all his best work in the USA was personal—the famous series of pictures from his apartment window of Washington Square is typical—and it was not until he gave up his job in 1962, and shortly thereafter rediscovered his ‘lost’ Hungarian and Paris negatives of 1912-36, that his reputation revived.

— Peter Hamilton

Bibliography

• André Kertész: Diary of Light, 1912-1985 (1987)