Word: kertesz
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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...
...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...
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...