The muse's favourite
Bruce Bernard
ANDRE KERTESZ: HIS LIFE AND WORK edited by Pierre Borhan BullfinchlLittle, £45, pp. 367 Tme, Andre Kertesz is not only the `photographer's photographer' as demon- strated by the special respect he ultimately inspired in nearly all the best practitioners of the art, he is photography itself s own photographer, in that he appears to have had deeper communion with its unnamed muse than any of them, and to have made his photographs so much for their own sake and entirely out of the medium's own nature. His work seems to belong to him- self (and whoever she is) totally, and in spite of having complained for much of his life about lack of recognition, he must have known that his devotion to its mysterious essence could never seem as immediately or easily impressive as his contemporaries' more straightforward picture-making and personality projections with the camera. `I am an amateur and I intend to remain an amateur for the rest of my life,' he declared very early on, though that attitude would oblige him, with quite a few other commercial interruptions, to take 3,000 highly professional pictures of grand hous- es inside and out for American House and Garden between 1945 and 1962. Andre (French adaptation of his given name Andor) Kertesz is rare among emi- nent photographers in never having wanted to be a painter or any other kind of visual artist for a moment. As a boy in Budapest during the first years of the century he saw some of the earliest magazines that used photographs and immediately decided to be a photographer — imagining his own photographs while impatiently waiting to acquire a camera.
But he did not then take 'magazine' pic- tures — the images were much more self- sufficient and need only a caption of place and date. Tender, elegiac, often high-spirit- ed and ingeniously simple, they speak entirely to the eye, and even his passionate- ly playing cellist of 1916 does not arouse one's curiosity about the no doubt very Magyar sounds he was making. The pic- tures that he took as a young soldier in the first world war are not about fighting and death but simply about people in altered circumstances being themselves and mostly still — though sometimes with their move- ments very purposefully arrested. He would always be absolutely certain about his sub- ject matter, and its limits are determined only by a special kind of ripeness for the camera that only he could have ever per- ceived. He seems to have explored an almost infinite range of possibilities folkloric, humorous, pure landscape, all kinds of subtle asides of observation, por- traits made with real respect, erotic and affectionate images, near abstractions and approaches to surrealism — and never forced these last two categories further than his very firm idea of photographic truthfulness would permit him. 'The Bal- cony' and 'Arm and Ventilator' are extraordinary examples of this subtle con- tingency.
His famous 'Distortions' — photographs of female nudes taken through fairground mirrors — were not manipulated pictures, but artful records of what such mirrors can The Balcony, Martinique, January 1st, 1972 do, They were commissioned by a frivolous Paris magazine Le Sourire in 1933 and Kertesz always valued them, getting very angry when the Museum of Modern Art in New York asked him to crop the pubic hair on the one they deigned to show. Else- where he shows a keen interest in distor- tion created by reflective surfaces; they must have afforded him some relief from the rigours of his commitment to optical verisimilitude without betraying it.
The extraordinary ingenuity and funda- mental seriousness of his humour are unique and he is never guilty of making those 'jokes' which can make photography shallow and ephemeral. He sometimes irks me with a too artful placing of a figure, bird, cloud or shadow and I now actually dislike the shadow of a bird on a New York brick wall of 1977. But even so he executes such ingenuities better than anyone.
He was very good with women, notably Elizabeth, his teenage girlfriend who would be his wife until her death at the age of 71 — and also with many others. His concern is always with the whole physical girl or woman and equally with her character her attraction does not flash out only from her eyes or other parts of her face or anatomy. But this feeling for wholeness permeates all his subject matter and demands a sustained kind of attention that is nearly always repayed by a unique sense of enlightenment.
I was fortunate enough to meet Kertesz in 1979 in his eyrie on 25th Avenue. By then a widower of 85, he spent his time shooting pictures of Washington Square from the window and making beguiling and mysterious colour polaroids of kitsch deco- rative objects and other oddments, all the time complaining to visitors about the dan- gers of New York, the abomination of the f.64 school (the minimum aperture, totally sharp-focus school of photography founded by Edward Weston) and also about a woman living in the building who plied him with excessive quantities of goulash. He presented me with a black-and-white still- life photograph which was a sexy little joke (he could by then afford to abuse the pho- tograph) and referred to his 1916 shot of an Austro-Hungarian soldier patting a peasant woman on the backside. Only the colour polaroids were important to him by then and can, I think, be seen as an appro- priate and entirely original coda to his great body of work.
Nearly a third of the pictures in the book under review have never been published before and they make Kertesz look more protean than ever. I have enjoyed looking at it, each time with increasing pleasure surely rare with reproductions of pho- tographs and with all but the very best orig- inal prints. The texts, by Pierre Borhan and three others, are interesting and informa- tive, though with some of the art-speak and fulsome 'insights' that are inevitable in the kind of hagiography that this book (and perhaps this review) had to be.
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