Kertész was born in Budapest in 1894. He began photographing at age eighteen. It’s fascinating to watch his career evolve. Right from the start he had an eye for light and shadow. Albers says, “The use of shadows would become Andor’s poetic signature as a photographer.” She calls him a “poet-photographer.” Her descriptive analyses of his early pictures are excellent. Here, for example, she considers Bocskay-tér, Budapest:
In one photograph Andor took, the square’s only lamp turns a section of the street into a starkly lit stage. A solitary man in an overcoat and hat, his model Jenő, hugs a wall as if in the opening scene of a Gothic melodrama, half merging with his doppelgänger shadow.
It’s a miracle that he survives WWI. He’s conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army. He and his battalion march to Galicia, the most savage killing ground of the eastern front. Even in the chaos of army life, Kertész manages to take photos. Albers writes,
At some point during that trek, Andor took a picture. The top half of Forced March to the Front is inert sky. Below, a rope of soldiers coils over fenceless fields. Any army’s operations rely on subsuming individuals into the corps and reducing them all to sameness. The exception in Andor’s picture is one soldier who turns his head, shows his face, and thus reads as an individual. Andor’s self-assertion in taking the picture parallels that of the soldier. He too briefly breaks rank and exits the war-machine to act as a seeing and thinking individual. By selecting and recording the scene, he makes it his and not the army’s. For the fraction of a second it takes to expose his glass plate, he holds those hundreds of men back from the rush to oblivion.
He’s wounded in battle and taken to a Red Cross hospital where, after surgery, he eventually recovers. After that, he’s stationed in Esztergom, his regiment’s home base. While there, he spends hours tramping the surrounding hills, fields, and roads. Albers writes,
One Sunday he returned from Bátorkeszi (today Bátorove Kosihy), northeast of Esztergom, with a negative that could illustrate the opening scene of a nineteenth-century novel. There he had met a young notary, pastor, and schoolmaster standing around after church, bandying words and enjoying a smoke. Village men typically donned dark suits on the Sabbath. But those in Andor’s picture cut more worldly figures than most with their starched collars, watch chains, and self-possessed airs. The notary makes a graceful hand gesture. Like his offbeat felt hat, it suggests a bureaucrat with a bohemian soul. Andor’s picture cocoons him and his friends in an eternal Sunday afternoon, even as the European civilization they represent was shattering all around them.
The war grinds on. For two years, Kertész ricochets around Central and Eastern Europe, traveling mostly by military train. Whenever possible, he takes pictures. Albers writes,
Everything piqued Andor’s interest. He photographed farmhouses, a kid smoking a cigar butt, a concert on a ship, trees and streams, a makeshift market set up among ruins, soldiers relieving themselves in a ditch, street-cleaners, a sandal maker, and burned-out boxcars. Turks, Russians, Romanians, Germans. Himself. In Albania, he took a self-portrait with a Muslim man and his three sons. Judging from the pictures, they were kindred spirits, though it’s unlikely that Andor had any language in common with the Albanians. The nationalism that was the root cause of the war was irrelevant.
Kertész is in Budapest when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses. The city is in turmoil. Kertész has a job at a bank. Back to drudgery five days a week. Albers quotes him: “Being a photographer in Budapest was like being zero.” He continues to take pictures. But not of war or strife. That wasn’t his thing. As Albers says, “He had photographic interests and values that were distinctly his own.” On October 7, 1925, he boards a train for Paris: “His life swung open on the unknown.”
In Paris, he hangs out at the Café du Dôme. He gets a job as a retoucher at a studio. He meets Man Ray. He meets Piet Mondrian. He takes a photo of Mondrian’s apartment. Albers writes,
The right side of André’s vertically bisected Chez Mondrian shows the stairwell landing outside the artist’s door. The light from an unseen window falls on the bannister, the stairs, the doormat, and the wall across the hall. The darker half of the photograph, to the left, includes Seuphor’s boater and a jacket hanging behind a table just inside the apartment. At the table’s edge sits a round vase with a painted wooden tulip. André probably moved that too. He knew that its shadow, when it was right, would bring his picture to life.
I’m only a third of the way through this delectable book. I’m at the point where Kertész takes The Stairs of Monmartre (1927) – one of my favorites. Albers tells me something about this superb picture that I didn’t know before – that it’s the second of two versions. Kertész wasn’t satisfied with the first one. He goes back for a second try. This time he has a new Hugo Meyer Satz Plasmat lens on his camera. Albers writes,
André’s second attempt at The Stairs of Montmartre resolved the scene into a remarkable image. In this version, a man sits on the bottom step, a woman approaches, and the viewer is left to imagine what will happen between them. They give the image a narrative tension. Formally, André has tightened the composition and, moving down two or three steps, shifted his viewpoint. More subtly, yet powerfully, his choice of lens distinguishes The Stairs of Montmartre.
She points out,
The Satz Plasmat warps the scene slightly. Although viewers may not consciously register that difference between André’s two versions of the staircase, most can sense it. In the second, the pitch of the stairs feels more acute. The cobblestones of the street beyond come up closer. The Satz Plasmat effects a subtly upturned space, conveying a feeling of which today’s colder lenses are incapable.
I relish such analyses. Everything Is Photograph abounds with them. I’m enjoying it enormously.
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| André Kertész, The Stairs of Montmartre (1927) |
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