Andre Kertesz: The Eternal Amateur Book

Hungarian photographer André Kertész eventually became famous for his wryly poetic images of everyday life. But achieving that distinction was a long slog, and Kertész--who emigrated to Paris in 1925 and New York in 1936--struggled for decades in near-obscurity and despair. Andre Kertész traces the artist's career with an engaging text and 250 exquisitely reproduced black-and-white photographs that span his long career. Throughout, he used his camera to create a visual diary of his life?haunting images suffused with a loner's sensibility. As a young man imbued with the romantic ideals of Hungarian nationalism, he photographed his handsome brother Jeno as Icarus, his exultant body silhouetted against the sky. Unable to find work after returning from the battlefields of World War I, Kertész tried his luck in Paris. It was the best move of his life. The City of Light was hungry for photographers to fill the new illustrated magazines. Avant-garde painters and sculptors opened up a new world of experimentation that prompted Kertész to photograph a series of female nudes seen in a funhouse mirror. And the new, lightweight Leica camera enabled him to snap scenes on the sly?a bum inspecting his toes on the banks of the Seine or a legless flower seller trying to tempt a passerby. After marrying his Hungarian girlfriend, he sailed to New York, lured by the promise of steady work as a fashion photographer and a climate more hospitable to a Jewish artist. But the agency job didn't suit him, and his emotional style had little appeal for American magazines. In photographs like "Lost Cloud"--a tiny white puff suspended next to the impersonal face of a skyscraper--he mirrored his own sense of dislocation. In succeeding years, he would make classic photographs of the city, including "Washington Square," an elegant aerial view of a lone pedestrian in a snowy landscape of bare branches and benches. Major recognition finally came in the early 1960s, when Kertész was in his late sixties. Fortunately, he lived and worked for twenty more years, basking in the newly exalted status of art photography. Andre Kertész serves as the catalog for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (through May 15, 2005) that travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 12-Sept. 5, 2005). ?Cathy CurtisRead More