'' PARADOX OF DISTORTIONS ''
PHOTOGRAPHER ANDRE KERTESZ
PHOTOGRAPHER
ANDRE KERTESZ
PARADOX OF DISTORTIONS BY ØIVIND STORM BJERKE'S
The nudes
from 1933, which are now presented under the title “Distortions,” are united
with Kertész’s production as one of a number of experiments he conducted with
optical distortions, as the result of mirroring in various materials.
Kertész’s awareness of how distortions of natural forms could create
interesting abstract and confusing patterns that dissolved an object was
raised when he photographed a swimmer in 1917.
The first
description of this type of pictures as “Distortions” is from 1939 and is found
in an article called “Paradox of a Distortionist” in the photo periodical
Minicam. In the critique, the pictures are upheld as those, which had
established Kertész as a recognised master. Kertész describe the images as
“Distortions” himself when he publishes the article “Caricatures and
Distortions” in the periodical The Complete Photographer in 1941. Kertész’s
“Distortions” was published as a book in 1977 with a preface by the critic
Hilton Kramer, who at the time was the chief critic at the New York Times.
Kertész had a
well-developed sense for oddities and often gave his pictures a humoristic
turn. It is therefore not surprising that he in 1933 published two photographic
series in the humour magazine Le Sourire. The first was printed March 12, and consisted
of twelve images. The reality we meet is, in other words, “surreal.” Later that
same year, in September 1933, Kertész published another five of the pictures
under the headline “Kertész et son miroir” in the periodical Arts et Métiers
Graphiques.
That Kertész
placed the pictures highly amongst his production is evident as he included a
selection of them in his first solo show in New York at gallery PM in 1937. The
pictures were grouped together with images where he had photographed objects as
a clock and a vase with a flower distorted in a mirror, under the collective
title Grotesque. The pictures immediately raised adoration and were plagiarised
by a number of photographers.
The series
emerged in a short span of time in the spring of 1933, and it is one of the few
times in which Kertész worked in a studio – his preferred fields of production
were streets, parks, public places and interiors such as scenes where life
played itself out in all its ordinariness. Kertész only exceptionally
photographed nudes, and characteristically enough, the nudes he is most known
for are not traditional nudes in the extension of the painterly tradition of
classical portrayals of the body.
The pictures were taken with the help of three mirrors and
an older and a young model. He used a large format camera with a zoom lens.
Kertész took two hundred takes. At the same time as the pictures can be argued
to constitute a particular event in Kertész’s production, the images include
all those elements that we can connect with what is idiosyncratic with
Kertész’s style in his use of light and shadow, distortions and deformations as
a result of reflections, mirroring and shadow play and the isolation of details
that function as eye-catchers. The interpretations of these elements in
Kertész’s pictures can be connected to the experience of the destabilisation of
a realistic image of the world, in the manner of traditional photography.
Kertész’s use of mirrors contradicts the traditional understanding of mirrors
as something that recreates a motif – reflects it. In Kertész’s mirrors, the
motifs are rather partly unrecognisable, even if you don’t loose touch with the
recognisable, as bodily details are recreated with utter precision and draws
the spectator back to the motif. Kertész plays with, and partly ionises, the
idea that what we see in photographs is real. Rather than seeing the images as
studies of the body, we may see them as studies of how the conditions in which
we study an object affects our perception of it and how vulnerable we are also
in our meeting with the photograph.
Kertész’s nudes can be read in a range of different
discourses. One of them is to read them as comments on the nude photograph’s
traditional functions, which to a considerable extent highlighted the female
body as the incarnation of harmonic and beautiful form. The pictures may also
be seen as an ironic comment on how the female body depicted as a sexual
object, had been a primary motif for photographers through the history of
photography.
In the captions that accompanied the pictures published in
Le Sourire, the photographs’ relationship to contemporaneous painting and
sculpture are pointed out, and the forms in Kertész’s pictures can be
associated with the rubber- and amoeba like bodily forms to be found in the
work of artists that worked with organic forms in the 1930s, the most known
being Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore. Salvadore
Dali had painted objects and natural forms that undergo metamorphosis. Also
Hans Arp’s organic sculptured objects are a relevant reference. As early as
1926, Kertész had created one of his most famous photographs, where a model
that lies on a couch, imitates the distorted forms in a markedly abstracted
sculpture on a pedestal next to the couch. In a photo historical context, it is
natural to place Kertész’s nudes in line with later experiments by Brassaï,
Hans Bellmer and Paul Strand, wherein different forms of manipulation created
distortions of forms.
Kertész never became a member of the Surrealist movement,
but it is natural to see his “Distortions” in line with the movement. We find
one of the few direct contacts with the Surrealists when Kertész in the May
issue of the periodical Bifur, which was edited by Georges
Ribermont-Dessaignes, who was an opponent of André Breton, published three
photographs.
It is naturally not a coincidence that Kertész uses the
female body for his experiment, and in several of the pictures, he focuses on
details, that to a considerable extent, identify women’s gender in a
metaphorical and literal sense. Representations of bodies are never neutral,
but express comprehensions of the body either from an anthropological, social,
functional, psychological or an aesthetic perspective.
Kertész’s “Distortions” has been frequently used by writers
who have dealt with the portrayal of women in modern art, often from a
psychoanalytical or feminist perspective. It is undoubtedly interesting how
Kertész uses the body as an object in exploration with optical effects. By
detaching the body from the usual perception of it, the body is estranged and
perception itself is thereby placed in focus. They are also anonymised by the
fact that the pictures can hardly be understood as psychological studies of the
models’ states of mind or personalities. The psychological aspect of the
pictures rests on the photographer in the question – what is his intentions
with the distortions – is it to say something about a comprehension of women,
being either his own or a comprehension in society that he wishes to convey,
and possibly comment on? Kertész’s pictures can also be read as a comment on
the space women occupy; a space which is completely destabilised due to the use
of mirrors. Usually, we have no problem with identifying the physical frame
around the body, but here it is not the body that is photographed, but the
reflection of it in its physical surroundings. In that sense, one may argue
that the pictures are not at all about the body, but about the disintegration
of a spatial perception to which one has become accustomed. In that sense the
pictures can be argued to have developed from the Cubists’ deconstructed and
fragmented spaces. The ruling disorder becomes an attack on the endeavour to
instil the human body in a lucid space, which provides it with a defined place.
Few photographs from the 1900s are better suited to provide
one with an understanding of the different means to treat the photograph than
“Distortions.” They are photographs that almost demonstratively place the
question of what it is that the pictures represent; why they are taken; how
they are taken; in which context they have been presented and, not least, how
the context in which we see them can affect how we understand the pictures.
Between 1928 and -32, Kertész was married to Rózsa Klein
(1900 – 1970). She came to play a considerable role in Kertész’s life, both as
a urger privately and as the one who provided for their livelihood through
large parts of the difficult years Kertész was to experience after the couple
moved to New York in 1936.
In 1936, Kertész secured a contract with the photography
agent Keystone. In light of the anti-Semitic atmosphere that spread through
Europe, the relocation to New York was an act that probably saved his life.
Despite of this, Kertész came to describe the following years as one long
disappointment.
Kertész’s name was known in the USA before he got there.
Photographs were shown for the first time in New York in 1932 at gallery Julien
Elvy in the exhibition “Modern European Photography,” where he showed 23
photographs. Through the exhibition and through his extensive publishing, he
was a well-known name in the inner circles of the world of photography and he
had all reason to believe that he could establish himself in New York. The
first years in New York, he became close to Baumont Newhall, who worked for the
Museum of Modern Art and arranged the important exhibition “Photography 1839 –
1937” where Kertész was represented. The book, which accompanied the
exhibition, is one of photo history’s most central publications. In 1941 he was
represented at the Museum of Modern Art with a picture he bestowed from the
exhibition “Image of Freedom,” which was curated by Edward Steichen, the most
well-known and powerful photographer at the time.
When the book Day of Paris, which was a new selection of
pictures with motifs from Paris that was given a dynamic and contemporary
layout, was published in the USA in 1945, it was well received, and in 1946
Kertész was given his first solo show in an American museum; the Art Institute
of Chicago.
In 1975, a selection of
the pictures was gathered in a book.
Kertész belongs to a generation of photographers who are
first and foremost associated with classical black-and-white photography, but
he also photographed in colours from 1951. He has also made a small number of
Polaroids.
The rediscovery of Kertész began in 1962, when he
participated in the International Photography Biennale in Venice and had a solo
show in Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which was hidden in South-France
during the war. Consequently, the bridge back to his heydays as a recognised
European photographer was re-established. His definite rehabilitation came in
1964, when John Szarkowski organised an exhibition with Kertész at the Museum
of Modern Art. The following decade, he exhibited all over the world; in Tokyo,
Stockholm, Budapest, London, Helsinki. In 1976, he was appointed as commandeur
des Arts et Lettres, and in 1983, Légion d’honneur. He had an exhibition at
Centre Georges-Pompidou in 1977. In 1984, he transferred all his negatives and
his correspondence to the French state. Mission du Patrimoine Photographique in
Paris, which is now a department of Jeu de paume, www.jeudepaume.org/,
administers the archive. In New York, he established the foundation “The André
Kertész and Elizabeth Kertesz Foundation.” Through the exhibition “André
Kertész of Paris and New York” shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1984, his important historical
position was fortified. Later on, the exhibition “André Kertész” at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington and Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, in
2005, with its accompanying publication, was the most important event and
introduction to a renewed international interest and publication of his works.
Kertész is one of the great developers of style in 1900s
photography. For many, the terms “style” and “photography” are almost
contradictory. For most people, a photograph is identical to the motif that is
portrayed. Nonetheless, similar to any pictorial medium, the increasing
awareness of the importance of the pictorial medium itself, and our interaction
with it, is applicable to photography; which technical premises are present;
what is photographed at different times in different societies; how do we
interact with the pictures in different ways and out of the different functions
pictures fulfil, is amongst the questions it is relevant to ask in addition to
focusing on the characteristics that are tied to the pictures’ technological
and physical conditions, material qualities, duplication processes, and their
composition and form. In such a turn from one-sided attention directed at the
motif, to viewing the picture in a broader artistic, cultural, social and
historical context, Kertész’s pictures are clarifying examples.
The example of Kertész provides us with an excellent
introduction to the different institutional regimes 1900s photographers worked
under: the early 1900s’ attempt to integrate photography into the arts on
painting’s premises; the interwar period, and the first decade after the war,
with its emphasis on photography as a medium for documentation and reportage,
until the 1960s, when photography is integrated into the field of arts. Kertész
lived through these phases in his enterprise as a photographer and it is not before
Kertész’ Distortions is placed within a larger art- and photo historical
context that it is possible to understand the exceptional position the works
have achieved.
The text is taken by professor ØIVIND STORM BJERKE'S writing, University of Oslo. Some part of writing had taken off from the
original part.
PHOTOGRAPHER ANDRE KERTESZ
