Word: kertesz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...work, that his rehabilitation got under way. In recent years, through books and smaller exhibits, his stock has risen further. The Chicago show, which travels in December to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, caps the long effort to re store his fame. Today, at 90, Kertesz still aims a zoom lens from the balcony of his Manhattan apartment, and he was in Chicago to be toasted at his exhibition's opening...
...Paris of Kertesz's early career was the cockpit of modernism, where surrealists, Dadaists and constructivists fanned the air with their manifestos. Kertesz felt the breeze but sailed his own course. He absorbed the lessons of constructivism, without becoming an arctic formalist. His fellow Hungarian expatriate Laszlo Moholy-Nagy could turn people into compositional load bearers upholding a grand design. Kertesz linked his formal sense to benign temperament. Joining elegant compositions to gentle human anecdotes, he achieved a formalism with the juice still flowing...
Sidestepping the familiar monuments of Paris, Kertesz sought candid bits of street life, preferably from a high vantage point, where he could inspect the world without engaging it. He had a geometer's orientation: in many of his best shots, people are distant figures, elegantly distributed among the grids and arcs of the city. The Paris that issued from his camera was not the serene city of Atget, immemorial and mostly unpeopled. Neither was it Brassai's close-in platform for the dramas of the demimonde. Kertesz's Paris was like the woman in his picture Satiric Dancer: pert, ironic...
...world opened for Kertesz in the later 1920s with the appearance of the Leica, the first popular 35-mm camera. During his early years in Paris, he was still shooting with a box camera into which a glass plate negative had to be inserted before every shot. The Leica, a lightweight instrument with film on a frame-advance roll, enabled photographers to catch slices of life on the wing. For Kertesz, it made possible subtle and serendipitous pictures like Meudon, a strangely arresting image in which a man is simply crossing the street in one direction while a train passes...
...such pictures, Kertesz recognized photography's affinity for the haphazard and the fragmentary, but he never lost his classicizing impulse. Through the good government of composition, the most frivolous bits of life -- scraps of poster advertising, a hodgepodge of footprints in the snow -- were redeemed by him and made coherent. With his camera, he once said, "I give a reason to everything around...