PHOTO:André Kertész

The Hungarian photographer André Kertész (2/7/1894), is one of the most original photographers of the 20th century, often creating unexpected compositions from everyday subjects. In 1925 he moved to Paris where he established himself as an artist-photographer and his signature style evolved. In 1936, he emigrated to the United States and settled in New York, where for more than 20 years he created picture for various magazines. The last years of his life until his death, when his wife passed away, he stopped to photograph in any other place except his apartment, making and the known picture with the fork.

By Dimitris Lempesis

Kertész was born in Budapest, starting in 1912, he made his first photographs in his spare time while working as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange. As Kertész later recalled, his camera became “A little notebook, a sketchbook. I photographed things that surrounded me—human things, animals, my home, the shadows, peasants, the life around me”. Here the composition is less about the seen than the unseen. Kertész captured a couple peeking at concealed circus performers through cracks in a wooden fence; the man appears to have just one leg. While reviewing a portfolio of his early work, Kertész stated, “I photographed real life—not the way it was, but the way I felt it. This is the most important thing: not analyzing, but feeling”. In the early 1920s Kertész became restless in Budapest and craved broader artistic opportunities. After three of his photographs were accepted into an important Budapest exhibition, he moved to Paris in October 1925 and registered his profession as “photo reporter.” There he continued his practice of wandering the streets, photographing the world around him. In Paris, Kertész began exhibiting his work and embraced Modernist approaches to photography. By 1926 Kertész was acutely conscious of the visual arts beyond photography. He became engaged with still lifes, a subject favored by contemporary painters and one he would explore over the course of his career. In 1933 Kertész was asked by the publisher Querelle to contribute nude photographs to the men’s magazine Le Sourire. Since the war he had been interested in the optical distortions created by water or the chromium-plate housings of auto lamps. For this project he used three mirrors and a camera designed to expose 9-by-12-centimeter negatives fitted with an early zoom lens. “Sometimes, just by a half-a-step left or right, all the shapes and forms have changed. I viewed the changes and stopped whenever I liked the combination of distorted body shapes”, Kertész recalled. In 1936 the Nazi regime was gaining strength and moving across Europe. Kertész left Paris for New York, where he was offered a job with Keystone Press Agency and where he would live for the rest of his life. Soon after arriving in New York, Kertész spent time prowling the streets looking for fresh subjects, just as he had done in Paris. Kertész retired from commercial work in 1962 and turned his camera once again to the commonplace objects and situations that had always been his favorite subjects. In 1979, the Polaroid Corporation gave him one of their new SX-70 cameras, which he experimented with into the 1980s, he started mainly photographing inside his apartment or focusing outside his window. This of course in no way prevented him to create a series of shapes full of motion and emotion.