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Introduction
Self-Portrait, Paris is conjured from practically nothing: parts of a door and a wall, the shadow of the photographer gripping the tripod attached to his camera. A shadow within a shadow, actually, because of the two light sources, one yielding an ordinary profile, the other, an oafish umbra. Tucked into the picture’s upper-left corner is the only material object: the box lock on the door. The lock resembles a camera, with its covered keyhole as the lens, complete with focusing ring. What’s behind that keyhole? The image offers no clues. Self-Portrait, Paris is a scene from a shadow play. A meditation on photography, seeing, and self. A nod to the negative-positive process, described by one of its inventors as “the art of fixing a shadow.”
Behind the real camera that winter night in 1927 stood a tall, scrawny, thirty-two-year-old transplant to Paris. André Kertész had arrived from his native Hungary sixteen months earlier on a train ticket purchased with a loan from a cousin. Paris represented his best hope to establish himself as a photographer. Whatever that meant. Photographers made their living from studio portraiture, newspaper work, or commercial jobs like supplying pictures for postcards. All that bored André. He wanted a more direct contact with life. But he did need to eat.
He spoke little French, nor did he believe he could learn. He had no savings. Often he skipped meals or made do with bread, butter, and milk, tallying his purchases each night before bed. A baguette cost the equivalent of a nickel, a bottle of milk and cube of butter, fourteen cents. His eyes were irritated. He couldn’t sleep through the night, typically only two or three hours. Come afternoon, he might doze off on a park bench. In letters postmarked Budapest, André’s family and friends were pleading with him to forget France and come home. As for his Hungarian girlfriend — if she still was his girlfriend — she had ordered him not to come home until he made a success of his life. In the eight years since the Great War ended, he had struggled to square his passion for photography with the pressure he felt to achieve worldly success. Yet he’d left Hungary still “a nobody” in his estimation and hers.
From his first hours in Paris, André had drifted through its parks and streets, brimming with inquisitive wonder about this city he was interpreting with his Goerz Tenax, a favorite camera — his companion, his accomplice, almost his double. Locals tended to scurry by this lost-looking foreigner. But a bevy of friends eased his isolation. Nearly all were Paris-savvy émigré artists centered in Montparnasse, mostly Hungarians. André lingered in their studios, admired their art, showed up at their parties. He would photograph, later giving prints to each of his friends. As they arranged themselves for a group picture — some laughing, some draping an arm on a friend’s shoulder, one clutching a violin, another a bottle — André would position his camera on a tripod and set the timer, then dash in to include himself, affable, bright-eyed, and grinning.
Most of his days included a stop at the Hungarian table on the terrace of the Café du Dôme, where every free spirit in Paris landed sooner or later. There his pals introduced him around and started a buzz about his unorthodox portraits, still lifes, and urban scenes, which they passed hand to hand. That had brought André a scattering of commissions. Publicity shots for the string quartet led by his friend Feri Roth. Pictures of the Montmartre villa that the Viennese architect Adolf Loos was building for the Dada poet Tristan Tzara. Portraits of a doctor, a dancer, a bibliophile.
The trickle of income had allowed him to rent the seventh-floor walk-up on the rue de Vanves (today the rue Raymond Losserand) in the fourteenth arrondissement, where he took Self-Portrait, Paris. A maid’s room the size of a small storage space, it had no kitchen, bathroom, or heat. No one would describe the place as charming, even though André would fix it up with pictures, shelves, and linens sent by his mother. He was installing a darkroom. After sixteen months of lugging his belongings from one threadbare hotel or makeshift bedroom to another, borrowing or improvising workspace, his garret represented a victory. He had a door with a lock and a dormer window. He had an aerie. Almost a home. A French home.
Born in Budapest in 1894, André began photographing at age eighteen. From the start, he did what others did not. When portraiture meant stiff formal poses, he snapped pictures of Roma children cavorting, his relatives schmoozing, and himself racing, jumping, or swimming with his brothers. When photo reporters were taking head shots of politicians, he — by then, the lead photographer for France’s most visually audacious magazine — zeroed in on billboards, marionettes, and a fortune teller reflected in her crystal ball. When razor-sharp prints of grandiose landscapes were winning applause, he concentrated on views of waterfronts, park benches, and vacant lots, all slightly grainy. In a century when the photography world revolved around war, social upheaval, outsize personalities, and fashion, he kept his eyes on the commonplace. All his life, André swam against strong tides, claiming the right to photograph as he pleased.
As well as André’s subjects, his ideas about what photographers could do were unorthodox. He conceived of the portrait in absence, a still life selected and arranged to express the animating spirit of the objects’ owner. He took some two hundred pictures of female nudes reflected in funhouse mirrors, pictures that so disconcerted even his admirers that the work did not receive a solo exhibition until half a century later. And he was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica, the camera now mythically linked to street photography. The practice of prowling the city in a state of heightened visual sensitivity had been around since the nineteenth century, but it took André and his Leica to make it dynamic and modern.
All the while, photography was radically changing. The improved photomechanical technology of the 1920s allowed the expanding European picture press to deliver images straight to the masses. Shifting the spotlight from the photograph as an object seen by a relative few to the photograph as a reproduction embedded in text and seen by hundreds of thousands transformed the medium into a driving social and cultural force. André was there, pioneering subjective photojournalism and delivering what was arguably the world’s first great photo essay.
Insisting that he was an “eternal amateur” (read: he would always work as he pleased), André lived and breathed photography for seventy-three years. Even in old age, he stayed curious and inventive, handling light with nimbleness, skill, and joy.
“Whatever we have done,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once declared on behalf of himself and other photographers, “Kertész did first.” When the two met, Cartier-Bresson would jokingly fall to his knees, hold out his Leica, and beg for a blessing. He was not alone in following André’s lead. André coaxed Brassaï into picking up his first camera and taught him how to shoot pictures at night. Robert Capa owed André an even more elemental debt: The older photographer fed the irrepressible youth, gave him a bed when he couldn’t afford a hotel, and tutored him in the basics of photojournalism. The German photographer Marianne Breslauer drew inspiration from André’s photographs of pedestrians and shadows, the British Bill Brandt, from his distorted nudes. In the 1940s, the young Robert Frank emulated André’s agility with the Leica and even poached one of his favorite subjects: Parisian park chairs. Speaking in 1952, the French photographer Willy Ronis declared himself “open-mouthed with admiration” at André’s pictures. Robert Doisneau dubbed him “the Master.” In the 1960s, Hiroji Kubota and Sylvia Plachy joined the ranks of his protégés. The list goes on: The currents of modernism delivered the practices of André Kertész to photographers far and wide.
So it’s startling that his name, unlike those of some he helped and inspired, has faded from public awareness. During the eleven years I was researching and writing this book, my references to André Kertész to people around me most often drew blank looks or questions about how to pronounce his last name. (It’s Kertess.)
Even cultural historians are apt to overlook this photographer’s photographer. “Make a list of the major American photographers,” proposes Ross Wetzsteon in his intellectual history of Greenwich Village, “and compare it to the list of photographers who have lived in the Village: Mathew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus.” Nary a mention of André, a naturalized American. Yet André lived in, loved, and photographed the Village for more than three decades. His lyrical images of a snow-blanketed Washington Square count among his signature works.
A gentle and generous man with an unassuming manner, André was endowed with Old World charm and a roguish sense of humor. Yet he lacked the career-propelling joie de vivre of the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, the social instincts of Brassaï, the intellectual sophistication of Walker Evans, and the charisma of Robert Capa. Because he never mastered English or French, conversations with him tended to bog down under his interlocutor’s strain to understand what he was saying.
Moreover, outraged and aggrieved by the lack of recognition during his first decades in the United States (he moved to New York in 1936), André never let anyone forget how badly he believed he’d been treated. Even though Americans made him rich and famous in the end, he couldn’t get the taste of rejection out of his mouth. “Honors Heap on Bitter André Kertész, Decries Lack of Praise,” announced a 1980 United Press International dispatch about the latest shower of awards on the eighty-six-year-old. “Given his accomplishments, one would assume Kertész would be content,” comments the reporter. Kertész was not. He took advantage of that interview, and many others, to spew invective at Americans. “Oh, what an irritating man André Kertész was!” shuddered his friend the New Yorker writer Brendan Gill.
A bookworm since childhood and a secular Jew, André may or may not have read the memoirs of the Vienna-born Nazi death camp survivor Jean Améry. If not, he should have. Resentment, writes Améry, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.”