André — CLICK! A New Opera

André Kertész 1894 - 1985

The brilliant and innovative career of Hungarian born photographer André Kertész (born: Andor Kertész) began in 1912 and spanned 73 years. Trained for a career in the financial world, Kertész devoted his earnings and free time to exploring his fascination with photography. His early images of family members and the Hungarian countryside reflect his rich interaction with contemporary Hungarian artists during an unprecedented and historic period of cultural and artistic growth in Hungary. Kertész’s work reveals a finely developed vision, present from the moment he first picked up a camera. His ability to construct lyrical images, infused with wit and insight, would remain a constant throughout his long career.

Frustrated by his inability to fulfill his dream of pursuing a career as a photographer in Hungary, Kertész moved to Paris in 1925. After a short period of artistic and personal struggle, his pioneering vision brought him great success. His approach to the medium helped define the shape of photography and photojournalism in Europe, and subsequently in America. During the next eleven years, Kertész built an extraordinary body of work, influenced by and influencing the many artists with whom he interacted in Paris between the wars.

By the mid-1930s, Kertész began to struggle professionally in an increasingly competitive Europe. Invited to work for a picture agency in the United States, he and his wife Elizabeth left for New York in 1936. From the beginning, his career in the United States proved problematic. Although he arrived to witness an explosive growth in the magazine industry in New York City, his vision, personality and artistic temperament never found a home in American photojournalism. Unable to return to a Europe after the outbreak of WWII, Kertész struggled to find steady work through freelancing. He finally secured a staff position at House & Garden magazine in 1945 where he languished for 17 years creating architectural photographs far below his journalistic and artistic capabilities. Although adored by Conde Nast’s staff and publishers for shaping the look of the magazine, Andre defined this period as his “lost years."

In 1962 at the age of 68, deeply embittered by his lack of artistic and commercial success in America, Kertész resigned from House and Garden to pursue his own art, consciously redefining himself as an amateur again. For the next 23 years, he photographed with the recaptured enthusiasm of his early years in Hungary and France. By the mid 1970s, he had reestablished himself as a predominant figure in the fledgling fine art photography world.

Just as Kertész’s reputation began to soar, his wife and lifelong companion, Elizabeth, died in 1977 after a long battle with lung cancer. Grief stricken, Kertész virtually stopped photographing. Eventually he returned to photography to express his pain and sadness, this time using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. Although the elegant images that he produced were intensely personal, Kertész’s keen sense of timing and delicate composition transformed these delicate little photographs into archetypal images capable of making deep emotional statements about the world around him. He went on to create a powerful and voluminous body of work.

Universally identified as “a poet with a camera”, Kertész was still a working photographer when he passed away in 1985 at the age of 91. Recognized as a major figure in the history of photography, his work was honored by artists and photographers, collected by major museums and galleries and studied by scholars. With more than 20 books published in his name, Kertész's lifelong battle for recognition had been won.