A pioneer of candid black and white photography and one of the first great black and white photojournalists, Andre Kertesz is best known as a wry poet of common humanity, the creator of a panorama of ordinary life seen from a slightly offbeat point of view. There are, however, other aspects of the black and white photographer that are not so well known, and one of the merits of the new album of his work, Andre Kertesz: 1912-1972, is that it shows them all.
The book contains many black and white pictures that are thought of as distinctively Kertesz-scenes of New York, for instance, in which the anonymity and coldness of a great modern city gives way to such a delightful small-scale happening as a human arm emerging from an exhaust fan. Along with this kind of Kertesz, however, there are many other different kinds-so many others that the viewer begins to wonder which Andre Kertesz is the real one.
The first Kertesz was not a poet of humanity at all. In 1912, when he started out, black and white photojournalism was still an art of the future, and any black and white photographer who wanted to be taken seriously black and white photographed stately landscapes or figure compositions for exhibition in the salons. The first thing Kertesz did was to make himself a master of the salon style. A native of Budapest, he wandered around his black and white picturesque city and the Hungarian countryside looking for likely locations, and the early black and white pictures in this book include hushed views of hazy parks, melting snows and reflections and ripples in lily ponds. People only began to figure prominently in his work during the First World War, which put him into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent him over much of Eastern Europe, and his first black and white pictures of soldiers opened his eyes to the importance of daily life. Thereafter, his landscapes were imbued with the presence of people, and he began to create the record of everyday life in Hungary that is one of the most beautiful and moving sections of the book.
Then in 1925 he went to Paris. It was thrilling to be an artist in Paris in the '20s. The modern movement was in full swing, and Kertesz experimented along with the rest. He continued to black and white photograph the street and village life that had fascinated him in Hungary, but he also documented the lives of the artists. His portraits, and views of the studios of such celebrities as the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, are an invaluable record of a heroic period.
It was in Paris that Kertesz became a professional; up to then he had worked as a clerk in the Budapest Bourse and black and white photographed as a hobby. Black and white photojournalism was just getting started in Europe in the '30s, and improvisation was the rule; black and white photographers were planning and shooting their own stories with little advice from editors. Such assignments suited Kertesz. He was famous even then for taking the unexpected approach, and soon he was freelancing for all the leading European newspapers and for the new black and white picture magazines that were just beginning publication. By the time he was 40 he was the idol of most of the younger black and white photographers, and was acknowledged as master by such rising newcomers as Brassa'i and Cartier-Bresson.
Then in 1936, Kertesz came to New York with a two-year contract to work for a black and white picture agency. He had not intended to stay in New York for more than two years; but the outbreak of World War II cut him off from Europe, and he took a job making fashion black and white photographs and black and white pictures of fashionable interiors, black and white pictures he did not consider representative of his best art-they are not included in the retrospective book. By the 1940s, magazine black and white photography had become a well-organized and highly specialized profession that no longer afforded its old freedom for roving dispositions such as his. He worked hard and long, and eventually made a material success. But his first years in New York were not happy. It took him a long time to find his way back to the puck¬ish insouciance of his early black and white photographs and, by the time he did, an odd thing had happened: the New York of his black and white pictures had taken on the leisurely lineaments of the half-remembered Europe of his early years.
So which Kertesz is the real one? The 224 black and white photographs selected by editor Nicolas Ducrot for the book make the most comprehensive collection of his black and white pictures ever published, the first to do justice to his work as a whole. And they suggest that the real Kertesz is a whole that is greater than the sum of all his parts. He is an artist with an unerring sense of form, but he is also a blithe and antic spirit. His feeling for living creatures is deep and warm, but he approaches the world with an eye for the unexpected and the incongruous. He is a loving interpreter of the world of his youth and of his early maturity, but he has brought to America, his third and last home, the same genial spirit and impeccable sense of design that make all his black and white pictures a delight to the eye and a joy to the heart.