André Kertész

Budapest and the early photographs

Kertész was born Andor Kertész in Budapest in 1894. He began photographing while still a young man in Hungary, before the First World War, using a small plate camera to record scenes of rural life, family, and the Hungarian countryside with a directness and intimacy that was anomalous for the period. The conventional photographic subject was staged; Kertész photographed what he found, from angles that suited the scene rather than the convention.

He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the war and continued photographing at the front — images of soldiers at rest, of a swimmer in a flooded field, of a farm horse — pictures that read less as documentation than as evidence of a temperament alert to the particular.

Paris: the decisive decade

In 1925 Kertész moved to Paris, the centre of the Western avant-garde. He integrated quickly. He befriended Piet Mondrian — and made a famous photograph of Mondrian's studio on Rue du Départ, a composition of extreme geometric clarity that reflects its subject's obsessions with more precision than any description. He moved in the circles that included Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger. His photographs appeared in French illustrated magazines; he was among the first photographers to work regularly with the new small-format cameras — Leica and similar — that would transform photojournalism in the following decade.

His Paris work established the visual vocabulary that would later be attributed to others: the elevated viewpoint, the compressed city geometry, the human figure caught in an unselfconscious instant. Cartier-Bresson, who arrived in Paris several years after Kertész, later acknowledged him as a primary influence.

In 1933 Kertész made the Distortions series: nude figures photographed through curved fairground mirrors, the bodies warped into fluid, almost biomorphic shapes that aligned his photography with the surrealist concerns circulating in Paris at the same moment. The series was unusual in his output — more formally experimental than his characteristic street and still-life work — but it demonstrated the range of a photographer who refused to be confined by a single mode.

New York: recognition deferred

Kertész moved to New York in 1936, intending a short stay. The Second World War fixed him there. He worked for Condé Nast publications — primarily House & Garden — for the following two decades, producing interior and still-life photographs that were professionally accomplished but remote from the personal work that had defined him in Paris.

His reputation in New York lagged behind his standing in Europe. He was admired by photographers who knew his work; he was not, for a long time, visible to institutions or the broader public. He later spoke of this period with evident pain, feeling that the American market had no category for what he had been doing in Hungary and France and no particular interest in learning.

The reckoning came late but clearly. Major exhibitions and a recognition at Venice confirmed a stature that the critics had been slow to reach. His photobooks — On Reading (1971), a collection of photographs of people absorbed in books made across decades and continents, and Washington Square (1975), a sustained meditation on the park visible from his apartment window — gave American audiences access to his sensibility in a form they could hold.

Legacy

Kertész died in New York in 1985 at the age of ninety-one, having outlived most of the arguments about his significance. Today the consensus is settled: he was among the architects of the modern photograph — the informal, small-camera, street-level image of lived experience — and his Paris work of the late 1920s and early 1930s holds its own against anything produced in that period.