Kertész - A Singular Vision

André Kertész. Got there in the end, didn't I? Above is "Atelier Mondrian" [Mondrian's Studio], from Kertész' Postcards From Paris, a series of photographs produced by him during his period working and living in the French capital between his arrival from Budapest in 1925, and 1936, the year he moved to live out the rest of his life in New York, dying in 1985 at the age of 91. Kertész was a Hungarian photojournalist and photographer, who first picked up a camera aged 16, a gift from his mother to him and his brother Jenö. Apparently he quickly adjusted to  the device and the expressive medium itself, becoming technically skilled in what was then still a relatively arcane and skilled art, learning early on the delicate skill of long-exposure available-light photography at night: a technique that yields images of surprising quality and beauty, having that absolute, physical imprint of 'time' implicit within a single, exposed frame of film or glass plate. A frame which is the accumulation of many minutes or even hours of elapsed time where only the static or semi-static objects in the subject actually register at all, renders the scene ghostly and ethereal in nature. Passers-by simply vanish, un-captured by the slow-to-react photographic emulsion. I had a friend at art college who specialised in night photography, and much later, by his example, I taught my then night-class in Bangor the technique.

That great photographic recorder of Parisian night-life, Brassaï, was a friend and Hungarian compatriot of Kertész, who came to photography rather later in life than his friend; not really seeing the point of the activity. One night in Paris, standing on the Pont Neuf with Kertész, whose camera was set up on its tripod, he said after some considerable time that maybe he should just take his photograph so they could go. Kertész' response was that "... it's being taken. Wait another fifteen minutes and we'll have it.",  which peaked Brassaï's interest, and on seeing the results on development of the image, he immediately decided to take up photography for himself. This in itself was the start of another legendary career, but that's a story for another day. While Kertész was as adept in the arcane arts of long exposure photography and its inherent technical intricacies as anyone could be at the time [and since], he was also one of the very finest recorders of the mundanities of life in a very un-mundane style.

His aesthetic sensibility and innate understanding of pictorial composition place him on the top table of the [photographic] arts in my opinion [and I'm certainly not alone in that thinking]. Many of his most striking images were made during his time in Paris, and some of the most interesting stuff featured as self-made postcards, printed on purpose-made photographic paper with the the reverse already printed as a postcard. This was, at the time, a popular format, as the postcard was one of the most immediate methods of sending a message/image from one person to another: most European cities would have several mail collections and deliveries a day at that time: much cheaper than the telegraph or telegram, and image-capable to boot. It also placed an aesthetic constraint on the photographer, who was forced by the limitations of size and proportion of the medium to make crucial decisions on content and composition in order to maximise the ultimate impact of the image on the viewer.

It was an inspired self-imposed limitation on Kertész that yielded some beautifully crafted images. The great thing for me about his photographs is manifest in the image above: he seldom had a truly vertical or horizontal plane or line evident in his images, choosing the just-off-kilter and deliberately employing the juxtaposition of the naturally occurring lines and planes in his compositions to create an overall graphic image: more design than representation. His adherence to framing in the camera was offset by a willingness to crop an image in the darkroom on printing it: fine-tuning and tweaking until he felt the balance of the composition was just so, evidenced above: he creates two-dimensional design from the three dimensions of the space photographed. He references the 'reality' of the image, whilst denying its solidity, and in doing so, grounds the image in the only space it can actually, truly exist: in two dimensions on a flat piece of paper. In the process, like all great photographers, he creates an implied narrative and time within the image itself, outside of the original, depicted reality. Great art indeed...