André Kertész: Observations, Thoughts, Reflections

by Matt Damsker

 

Share This

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on linkedinShare on pinterestShare on tumblrShare via email

Catalogue of exhibition at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, March 11-May 28, 2005. 128 pages. Price $75. Catalogue and photo inquiries should be directed to Stephen Daiter Gallery, 311 W. Superior St., Suite 404, Chicago, Illinois; phone: 1-312-787-3350; fax: 1-312-787-3354; email: info@stephendaitergallery.com.

This handsome catalogue and exhibition do elegant, eloquent justice to one of the 20th century's quintessential masters of photography. Collecting more than 50 of André Kertész's classics, along with some obscure works, from 1914 to his death in 1985, Chicago's Stephen Daiter Gallery brings typical passion and sensitivity to an important overview. The result is a study that begins in Kertész's native Hungary, moves through his crucial pioneering period in Paris, and concludes with images from his peerless half-century as a New Yorker.

It is important to note, as John Szarkowski does in his reprinted essay (one of several expressive bits of writing here), that Kertész was an important pioneer of "the special aesthetic of the small camera… Kertész had never been much interested in deliberate, analytical description; since he had begun photographing in 1912 he had sought the revelation of the elliptical view, the unexpected detail, the ephemeral moment--not the epic but the lyric truth. When the first 35mm camera--the Leica--was marketed in 1925, it seemed to Kertész that it had been designed for his own eye."

Indeed, Kertész's work proceeds not from the heightened drama of, for example, Cartier-Bresson's decisive-moment signature, but from a quiet mastery of pictorial space, with foreground and background effortlessly matched, and all manner of tension and balance in the figurative details and formal design. Thus, the great nude shot of Dana Haraszti, photographed in 1920, is a formal study of man in nature--seated contemplatively and vulnerably on a mound of earth, beside a river--with blades of grass and a far horizon balanced on an epic scale, and yet the effect is intimate.

And so, by the time Kertész turned to the handheld ease of the Leica, which coincides with his Parisian days, he was more than ready for the close-ups and casual angles that would help bring modernism into focus. In one strikingly fresh image, Kertész looks down a steep sequence of steps to trees and a street below. The tiny blur of a man pulling his cart near the middle of the frame is almost indistinguishable from the latticework of gates and handrails that define the heart of the photo. Yet that little flicker of humanity, and the offhand sense of scale which it imparts, make it a memorable shot.

Similarly, a seeming snapshot of an ornamental cast-iron horse at the Luxembourg Gardens is a startling confrontation with the everyday, as the scratched and mottled texture of a public object stands out in a soft-focus framing of trees and ground. No less potent is Kertész's handling, or rather his embrace, of deep shadow, as in a shot of a man standing on a desk to hang a picture, obscuring the small light source and casting the scene in a silhouetted mystery resolved only by the explanatory title of the photograph. This is a flutter of conceptual art worthy of Duchamp.

Indeed, Paris is where Kertész takes his greatest liberties, reimagining the bodies of female nudes via the funhouse-mirror elongations and grotesqueries of his "Distortions" series. This is Kertész taking on Picasso in his own meditative way, and delivering highly original work that suggests Henry Moore to us and continues to inspire painters and photographers.

Once in New York, by the mid-1930s, Kertész seems nothing less than haunted by the New World. A European cut off from his roots, he looks at Manhattan's skyscrapers with new eyes, finds images of isolation and disconnection in parks, streets, and fire escapes, and locates images that are strangely, surrealistically American. For example: "Arm in Ventilator," in which a man's arm hangs inexplicably from an opening otherwise taken up by the blades of a metal exhaust fan. Writing of this, National Gallery of Canada curator Ann Thomas notes that the image "shocks, disconcerts and intrigues more than it elucidates the facts of the world, evoking the classic power of surrealism to transform ordinary events into visual conundrums." The arm, we eventually realize, is only that of a repairman, but the mundane moment is turned into a rich symbolic stew by Kertész's eye--and by his passion for seeing so much more than meets it.

Matt Damsker is an author and critic, who has written about photography and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Bulletin, Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. His book, "Rock Voices", was published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press. His essay in the book, "Marcus Doyle: Night Vision" was published this past November.