Andre Kertesz Overview

Kertesz spent his first several professional years shooting idyllic pictures of his native Hungary, including strangely gentle images of World War I combat troops, and creating avant-garde nude distortion studies with his small-format 35mm Leica camera. His best-known work comes from his years in Paris (1925-1936), when he caught the city at the peak of its ripeness, in the age of noisy cafes, swirling traffic, the Surrealists, Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. He especially loved the moody vulnerability of the city at night, and created several nocturnes on the theme of misty urban solitude. His impeccable sense of design prevented him from using abstraction gratuitously. Rather, it was in Paris that his belief in photographic realism as an avant-garde principle began to coalesce. After Paris, he traveled to New York and met with fairly quick success selling his work at Conde Nast Publishing. He soon became known as the master of the unique "vantage point" perspective, which featured unadorned, open pictures that emanated a springy exuberance. Author John Szarkowski said of the photographer's style: "...in addition to this splendid and original quality of formal invention, there is in the work of Kertész another quality less easily analyzed, but surely no less important. It is a sense of the sweetness of life, a free and childlike pleasure in the beauty of the world and the preciousness of sight." Still, because of the unemphatic reserve built into his photographs, Kertesz's presence is subtle, unobtrusive, even submerged. As is often the case with highly innovative and original artists, he was fifty years ahead of his time, which meant that after 25 years of activity he suffered through 25 years of obscurity. Before his public reemergence in the 1960s, Kertesz was remembered more for his aphorisms ("Photography is my participation in the everyday thing," and "Photography is my diary with light") than for his work.