Daily Archive

That time has come again, at the end of the year, when people buy presents to each other… So, I thought to look at some of the recent photography publications. ‘New’ is not necessarily better, but certainly can tease our senses. And there is one book that has fully captured my attention.

Andre Kertesz: The Polaroids was published just last week. The Hungarian photographer (1894 - 1985), one of the most influential masters, with the poetic vision for the ’simple’ and ‘everyday’ subject, was hardly recognised in public during his lifetime in Paris and New York, but only after his retirement. Actually, this work comes from that later stage of his life.

Kertesz got a Polaroid SX-70 camera after the death of his wife. And he managed “to generate a whole new body of work through which he transforms from a broken man into a youthful artist” as Robert Gurbo, the curator of the André Kertész estate writes about The Polaroids.

“Taken in his apartment just north of New York City’s Washington Square, many of these photographs were shot either from his window or in the windowsill. We see a fertile mind at work, combining personal objects into striking still lifes set against cityscape backgrounds, reflected and transformed in glass surfaces. Almost entirely unpublished work, these photographs are a testament to the genius of the photographer’s eye as manifested in the simple Polaroid. 80 color photographs.”

 

“Andre Kertesz nearly always seems to have had a genuine affection for what he photographed” is Tim Atherton’s subtle comment in his blog Muse-ings. It is a comment that surely finds most of us pleased to agree with.

 

 

Many of these window compositions remind me - in a way - another of the 20th century great photographers, Sudek, when he was forced to stay home during the period of the second world war. He had also focused all his creativity to the simple settings of his window and mere personal possessions. Compositions of glass, eggs and paper, and views of the garden, under reflections and shadows, and through a special quality of light.

 

 

These images, however, use colour, vibrant tonalities and rich warm daylight to indicate an affective mood. They make full use of the polaroid effect. The images are often nostalgic, refer to the past, shared moments and places (somewhere there is Eiffel Tower), or more often to the beloved lost person. But they also become reflections of the lonely individual, which we assume is Kertesz himself, although his overall stance appears reflexive, connected with life, both its melancholy and its small pleasures.

 

 

The shapes tend to clarity and the compositions retain a realist form, as ‘’slices of life’ in the modernist tradition which Kertesz had been foundational to establish himself. Yet, this time the sliced life is his own, the reflection is personal. There are several self-portraits and references to a photographer within the collection.

 

All the same, however, the images captivate us with a dim emotional power and a kind of dreamscape quality. Even the subject - not the rather lucid subject-matter - is never clearly established, if it is about himself and his own literal experience or a wider concept and a product of his mind. I believe it is true that Kertesz was so much a modernist as much he expresses a strong surrealist side.

These photographs and all the Polaroids portfolio is property of the Andre Kertesz Estate and can be viewed there.