When photographers gather to trade myths about the craft, André Kertész usually sails into the conversation like an elusive figure sketched with soft graphite rather than carved in granite.
No towering ego, no shock tactics, only an unbroken devotion to finding grace where others saw clutter.
Born in Budapest in 1894, the young stockbroker spent free afternoons on the city outskirts photographing fishermen, road workers, and daydreaming relatives. He carried a small ICA box camera that fit in a coat pocket, a detail that foreshadowed his lifelong preference for portable tools. Those first negatives are tender studies of ordinary gestures, already hinting at the compositional instinct that would mature in Paris cafés, New York rooftops, and the quiet interior of his own apartment.
Kertész served on the Eastern Front during the First World War, an experience that could have hardened him into cynicism but instead sharpened his attentiveness to fleeting tenderness. Wounded, recuperating in a field hospital, he photographed comrades resting on straw mats, sunlight crossing their faces like fragile lace. He discovered that even misery contains micro expressions of care. After the war he experimented with a glass plate camera and learned that rearranging himself instead of the subject creates harmony without intrusion. This ethic of respect infiltrates every frame he made, differentiating him from contemporaries who staged modernist tableaux with calculated drama.
Paris welcomed Kertész in 1925, and the city became a living darkroom for his evolving ideas. Montparnasse buzzed with painters who bent perspective and poets who fractured grammar; Kertész listened and responded by bending light through new angles. He climbed the Eiffel Tower and pointed his lens straight down until the Champ de Mars became a cubist patchwork. He tilted horizons so that river barges seemed to sail into the clouds. Yet he did not do this for shock value. He referenced how a drifting glance actually behaves: erratic, curious, non linear. His prints remind viewers that eyes wander before settling on meaning.
In Paris he adopted the Leica, a revolutionary 35 millimetre camera that liberated street photography from the tripod. Kertész tucked the compact body under his coat and merged with crowds. One afternoon he saw a boy in a beret leap from a pontoon into the Seine. Instead of freezing the action at peak height he pressed the shutter a heartbeat earlier, capturing the arc of anticipation. The resulting photograph feels less like an athletic record and more like a visual haiku, balancing potential energy and stillness. Viewers fill in the splash with imagination. This refusal to chase the obvious climax separates Kertész from adrenaline driven photojournalists. He preferred what he called lyrical reportage, a genre where poetry guides the document.
Fame arrived quietly. Exhibitions at the Sacre du Printemps gallery and contributions to magazines like Vu and Art et Médecine placed his name alongside Man Ray and Brassaï, yet critics often struggled to label him. Surrealists loved his distortions but found him too gentle. Documentarians respected his timing but thought him impractical. Kertész shrugged and kept wandering. He photographed chimney sweeps napping on rooftops, a broken violin lying on cobblestones, a fork casting a perfect ellipse of shadow onto a dinner plate. Each frame reads like a secret letter addressed to anyone willing to slow down.
One of his most cited images depicts a soldier’s letter being opened by a child in a dusty Hungarian yard. The boy’s fingers hesitate on the envelope, and sunlight slices across his cheek. Composition arranges three zones: the letter in the foreground, the child in midground, a blurred farmhouse behind. Depth leads the viewer from curiosity to empathy. This layering strategy became a Kertész signature. He stacked foreground, middle, and background like chords, letting spatial melody guide emotions. Painters recognized the influence of Cézanne and Pissarro. Photographers saw a map for future street work.
Financial instability pushed Kertész to accept assignments, and in 1936 he boarded the SS Normandie for New York with his wife Elizabeth and hopes for steady magazine work. American editors admired his European portfolio but asked for bolder narratives. He tried. He photographed skyscraper silhouettes, Third Avenue traffic, and office workers at lunch. His composition remained elegant, yet his lyrical restraint confused publishers chasing dramatic headlines. The break came when he photographed Washington Square from his apartment window during a snowstorm. Trees traced precise strokes against white streets, tiny figures shuffled like black commas, and the whole scene breathed with solitary calm. Harper’s Bazaar published it, but large scale commissions remained elusive.
Feeling underappreciated, Kertész spent years working for House and Garden, shooting interior decorations and still lifes of silverware. Even these assignments bear his fingerprint. He framed a chair edge so that its shadow formed a delicate parallelogram across polished wood, turning product photography into studies of geometry. Eventually creative frustration pushed him into semi retirement. He withdrew to his fifteenth floor apartment near Central Park and projected memories through the lens.
The late 1960s revived interest in modernist pioneers. Curators realized their museums lacked comprehensive collections of early European street photography. They sought Kertész negatives, which remained neatly filed in metal boxes under his bed. Exhibitions at MoMA and the Bibliothèque Nationale repositioned him as a foundational figure. Younger photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa had already cited him as mentor. Now the public agreed. Vintage prints sold to collectors, and Kertész, in his seventies, watched overdue recognition arrive with gentle humor. He never seemed bitter, only amused at fate’s lagging timetable.
Talking about Kertész without mentioning light feels impossible. He treated illumination as subject rather than tool. In a photo of a broken tree branch floating on a lake, sunlight paints a perfect twin on the water surface, creating symmetrical ripples. The branch becomes bridge between reality and reflection, and light conducts the union. In another frame a chessboard on a window sill receives morning sun that turns black squares velvety and white squares incandescent. A small horse figurine stands guard, casting a spear like shadow that convincingly anchors fantasy inside domestic space. His prints teach that light is not only directional but emotional.
Composition for Kertész was not a rigid grid but an elastic field. He allowed diagonals to tease horizontals, circles to interrupt lines. Consider his photograph of people ice skating on a pond in Bois de Boulogne. From a high vantage, skaters carve arcs into the ice while their shadows stretch like elongated calligraphy. The camera captures actual bodies and projected doubles, doubling the rhythm. This dance between object and echo became a recurring motif. He once said his real subjects were relationships inside the rectangle. Skaters and shadows illustrate that philosophy perfectly.
Kertész experimented with distortions more consciously in his Distortion series from 1933. Using special curved mirrors in a Parisian fun house, he photographed nudes whose limbs swirled into serpentine shapes. Viewers might interpret the images as surrealist spectacle, yet even here composition governs chaos. Each limb recurs with mirror logic, each curve meets another curve at the frame edge, creating harmony inside disorientation. The series received mixed attention at the time, partly due to conservative critics wary of eroticism. Decades later it influenced fashion campaigns and fine art trends that embraced the body as malleable canvas.
Throughout his career Kertész avoided political manifestos. His photographs of Budapest peasants highlighted hardship, yet he did not promote ideology. In Paris he captured social dynamics indirectly, showing contrast between wealthy patrons sipping espresso and beggars resting against lampposts. In New York he documented immigrant neighborhoods with curiosity rather than agenda. This neutrality made him both timeless and difficult to categorize. He often remarked that his only goal was to photograph life as it flows, a modest claim hiding enormous discipline.
Technically he preferred natural light and hand held shooting. He favored shutter speeds that preserved motion blur just enough to suggest movement without sacrificing clarity. His negatives reveal consistent exposure accuracy, an impressive feat before modern metering. He printed meticulously, dodging skies to keep detail and burning corners to pull focus toward the center. He used glossy fiber paper for luminosity, toning prints in selenium to deepen blacks that anchor the luminous whites. Handling an original print feels like holding a polished stone found in a riverbed, smooth yet resonant with ancient energy.
Kertész influenced generations, though students sometimes absorb his lessons secondhand through Cartier Bresson’s decisive moment mantra. When Cartier Bresson photographed a man leaping a puddle behind Gare Saint Lazare, he echoed Kertész’s Balzac era shot of a boy skipping over water in Budapest nearly twenty years prior. When Saul Leiter framed umbrellas through foggy café windows, he picked up Kertész’s fascination with layered transparency. Even modern smartphone photographers channel Kertész when they balance reflections on glass with street scenes beyond.
Recognition intensified in his final years. He published several monographs, including On Reading, a series of people immersed in books across decades and continents, each image tracing how solitude flourishes in public. The series resonates stronger today when smartphones nibble at attention. He also released From My Window, intimate observations of cloud shadows drifting across Manhattan facades, tulips bending under evening breeze, and pigeon silhouettes perched on fire escapes. These late works prove that imagination does not weaken with limited mobility; it refocuses inward and upward.
Kertész died in 1985 at ninety one, leaving an estate of more than one hundred thousand negatives, many still unseen. Archivists continue to uncover gems: a Polish sailor serenading a barmaid, a carnival carousel glowing at dusk, Elizabeth pouring tea with slight laugh lines at her eyes. Each new discovery strengthens the sense that his archive is not retrospective but living organism still breathing new lessons.
What makes his photographs feel ageless is humility. He never imposed grandeur on his subjects. He let smallness speak. A fork on a plate, a pigeon on a chimney, a shadow on a staircase. In a time when images compete for loudest message, revisiting Kertész feels like stepping into a quiet garden where details regain dignity. He teaches that composition is not formula but curiosity arranged inside borders. Light is not effect but language. Most of all he proves that patience can transform any moment into poetry.
Young photographers often worry about access to exotic locations or cutting edge gear. Kertész answers by pointing to his first ten years of work, all shot within walking distance of his apartment. He counselled beginners to photograph what moves them emotionally rather than what impresses an editor. Genuine feeling, he believed, is visible in the final print. Technology serves only to reveal it.
Museums now group Kertész alongside giants like Atget and Evans, but he remains delightfully human. Letters to friends brim with self doubt. He lamented missed opportunities and complained about high rent. He loved postcards, chess, and red wine. He was generous with advice yet protective of privacy. Reading his diaries, you find gratitude threaded through every entry. He seemed amazed that the world continued to offer subjects each time he lifted the camera.
For those who wish to practice his philosophy, the path is simple and demanding. Carry a small camera you trust. Walk until your legs ache. Notice reflections, align lines, wait for human presence to break symmetry. Press the shutter when light and feeling converge. Print thoughtfully. Accept that some days yield nothing. Return tomorrow. Above all, believe that ordinary life deserves reverence.
André Kertész once said he never photographed for the sake of social commentary, yet his images inevitably comment on the human capacity for wonder. A boy with a bubble pipe, a widow reading under soft afternoon sun, a pair of dancers isolated by spotlight glare: each is a reminder that beauty hides in plain sight if one trains the eye to dwell rather than glance. Kertész trained his eye across seventy years, gifting future generations a blueprint for quiet revelation. His legacy whispers, compose with care, trust the light, and let the heart guide the frame.
