André Kertész

André Kertész (1894-1985), Hungarian-American photographer, known for his scenes of everyday life that catch the unexpected detail and revealing moment. He pioneered in using the small camera, producing photographs with the snapshot quality of life caught on the wing.

Kertész is often classified as a photojournalist because some of his most important work captures passing moments and events (see Photojournalism). But he is also celebrated as a source for surrealism in works where the eye is surprised by an unusual angle or by an unexpected focus or juxtaposition—for example, a close-up of an insect on the page of a book. His images also have unusual formal beauty. They are as much about angles and perspectives, vanishing points, changes of scale, and patterns of light and dark as about musicians playing, couples embracing, and friends socializing. His works range from studies of soldiers in Hungary during World War I (1914-1918) to surrealist distortions of the female nude, to a geometric study of the pipe and glasses of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, to a disturbingly impressionistic view of a couch at the far end of an otherwise empty cellar.

Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary. As early as 1912, he was taking spontaneous, unposed pictures of people and street life. During World War I he served as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. His photographs of soldiers in quiet moments are among his finest works. From 1925 to 1935 he worked in Paris, France, as a freelance photographer. In 1936 he was offered a job at Keystone Studios in New York City. He remained in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1944 and doing freelance photography until 1949, when Condé Nast Publications gave him an exclusive contract. A retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1985 further enhanced his reputation.