Word: kertesz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Picture Post (edited by Stefan Lorant) and the elegant French magazine Vu drew upon a breed of independent artist-photographer, often with one foot in Bohemia, to capture the arresting aspect of the everyday. Among the foremost practitioners were the German emigre Tim Gidal and Hungarian-born Andre Kertesz, whose enigmatic views of the Eiffel Tower and Paris streets imbued any human presence with an ephemeral tension...
...chief signifiers of the modern temper. But judged by the canons of good photography, those pictures looked fumbled, invertebrate. Klein's anarchic strengths went unappreciated by eyes looking for nice tonal gradations and the standard ironies. Where were the compositional ligaments that held even the airiest Andre Kertesz photo in an iron fist? Where was the fine printing? For that matter, where was the subject...
Oddly for a photographer who is known for keeping an autograph book, Eisenstaedt is sometimes held to lack an autograph of his own, an unmistakable style in the manner of Andre Kertesz or W. Eugene Smith. But the signature his work bears is more a matter of spirit than style, an embrace of life's episodes that is as benign and enveloping as eyesight itself. His 1963 picture of children watching a puppet show in Paris is both the consummate example of his close-in approach and the best metaphor for his own excitement in seeing...
Throughout the bitter years in the U.S., during which Kertesz felt forgotten, he continued to photograph. Some of the most pungent images in the Chicago show were made in New York during the 1940s and '50s. Partial to the human scale of Paris, Kertesz had to adjust his eye to the magnitude and visual disarray of America. In the process, he saw things that a more acclimatized vision might miss. In one picture from 1947, the immense web work of the Queensboro Bridge is played against the finer lattice of the superstructure around some storage tanks. Then diagonal ranks...
...exhibition disappoints on any score, it is only by coming to a halt in the mid-1950s, although Kertesz did not. The weighty catalog, written by Co- Curators David Travis and Weston J. Naef with Sandra S. Phillips, provides an admirable overview of the three decades in which Kertesz did most of his best work. But his later pictures are often no less finely conceived, especially those he made after retiring from House and Garden in 1962. Shows like this act as a catalyst, however. In New York City, for instance, the Susan Harder Gallery is showing his pictures...