André Kertész: the camera’s eye

The life of the Jewish-Hungarian photographer André Kertész had three distinct phases.  He lived in Hungary from July 1894 to 1925; in Paris from October 1925 to 1936; in New York from October 1936 to September 1985.  Nearly six feet tall, he was thin, with brown hair, blue-grey eyes and olive skin.  He served with the defeated Austro-Hungarian army in World War One, was wounded in the chest and took a bullet a quarter of an inch below his heart.  In hospital, he caught typhoid fever and malaria. Amazingly, he recovered.

Afterwards, he became a drill instructor and office worker, escorted wounded soldiers, carried medical supplies and guarded prisoners, as he jolted around eastern Europe from Hungary to Austria, Slovenia, Ukraine, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Albania.  He led a dull life in postwar Budapest, and failed in many soul-crushing jobs.  He compiled statistics in a bank, clerked at the Stock Exchange, even kept bees.

In Paris in October 1928, he married the physically and emotionally fragile Rózsi Klein.  He claimed “she had blackmailed him, or tricked him into marriage or threatened to kill herself if he didn’t agree”.  He then abandoned her and cut all ties with their mutual friends.  He later destroyed every document and photograph about her, and pretended he’d never married her.  He couldn’t get a divorce in France without her consent, which she refused.  He’d met his second wife, Elizabeth Salamon, his colleague at the Giro Bank, and fell in love with her on a trip home from Paris to Budapest.  In Paris in June 1933, he had a secret, bigamous, illegal marriage to Elizabeth.

He never learned to speak French or English properly.  He tortured the French language, bungled the tenses and could scarcely manage to utter a coherent sentence.  His phrasing and timing were disconcerting, and French words popped up incongruously in English conversations.  His favorite expressions were sonofbeech and Yunnerstan?  His pronouncements in Hungarian were clearer but simple-minded: “Photography is one thing, painting is one thing, but they are not the same thing.”

Kertész experienced abject poverty in Paris, and again in New York.  He lost his German market in 1933 when Hitler took power and banned Jewish artists.  As his artistic reputation increased during the Depression, his income went down and he was dependent on Elizabeth’s earnings from her cosmetics business.  He had to sell or spend most of the considerable gold and cash he’d inherited from an uncle.  In October 1936 he emigrated to New York to work for  a photo agency, the Keystone View Company.  But the U.S. Customs agents seized his 32-ounce gold bar, the last of his inheritance, which they eventually repaid in cash.

In New York as in Paris, Patricia Albers writes, “André lacked a network, spoke barely comprehensible English and had no gift for self-advertising.”  He was completely out of touch and taste with the work in well-paying glossy magazines.  He had to take commercial photographs to earn money and aesthetic ones to please himself.  He worked briefly for the Russeks department store, owned by the family of Diane Arbus, traveled all over America, and even shot from dirigibles and Piper Cub planes at 18,000 feet.  He felt betrayed, depressed and humiliated.

Kertész took blurred rather than clear images of old stones, tree branches, piles of leaves, lead soldiers, marionettes, carousels, billboards, pigeons, stray dogs, dog walkers, children, relatives, sketch artists, chess players, buskers, fortune tellers, snow-covered Squares, park chairs, mensches on benches, and his own boxes of vitamins and pills.

He also did portraits.  When one client burned herself while ironing and didn’t want to be photographed, he thought her bandaged hand was exactly the kind of weird detail that interested him.  In Paris he photographed many famous artists and writers, including Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, Foujita, Marc Chagall, Man Ray, Moïse Kisling and Chaim Soutine; Maurice Maeterlinck, Maurice Barrès, Colette, Ilya Ehrenburg and Georges Simenon.  But the language barrier was insurmountable, and these potentially influential people were only his models, never his friends.

Kertész taught technical skills and insider secrets to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Robert Capa and Bill Brandt, and even helped Sylvia Plachy (the Hungarian Sylvia Plath?).  His rather tame subjects of everyday life are not as exotic, dramatic and exciting as those of Sebastião Salgado, Capa, Cartier-Bresson; Lee Miller, Inge Morath, Diane Arbus; Bill Brandt and Paul Strand.  Lee Miller’s photos in postwar Hungary, Homeless Children and Execution of a Pro-Nazi Minister, are more powerful and interesting than any work by Kertész.

Many people found Kertész “an irritating and insufferable bore”.  A skilled manipulator of the truth, he exaggerated, misled and told downright lies about actual events.  Albers writes, “the more successful he became, the meaner he got.”  He couldn’t stop moaning about the “long agonising refusal to recognize his genius”. He falsely claimed that no artist had ever influenced him.  (On Majorca in the summer of 1970, Robert Graves pompously told me the same thing: “No one ever influenced me.  I always influenced other people.”)

Patricia Albers’ Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész (Other Press, 517pp, $50/£44.95) is thoroughly researched and well written, clear-eyed about his fantastic stories yet sympathetic to his crusty character.  But she has many dull sentences, even paragraphs, with lists of Hungarian names and technical details of cameras.  The great problem is that most of the 70 photos she describes are not included in the book.  She introduces them by saying: “André pulled out his camera,” “André set up his tripod,” “André trained his lens,” “André snapped his picture” and “André made eight or nine exposures.”  When shooting nudes (including pregnant women), whose pubic hair had to be cropped in New York, their exposure was particularly protracted.   Albers sometimes strains to inject profound meaning into simple photos and misses the mark.  Renée Maeterlinck and Her Borzoi does not recall Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, whose body does not “twist”. The flower in Chez Mondrian does not “remind viewers of the transience of life and the inevitability of death”.

At first, Kertész failed in New York as he had failed in Budapest and Paris.  Though he would have been killed if he’d stayed in France during the Occupation and moving to New York saved his life, he vaingloriously declared that he’d rather die in France than be rejected in America.  He eventually won the long-awaited recognition, fame and fortune, and had exhibitions all over America and throughout the world.  In old age, desperate for attention after his long years of poverty and obscurity, he accepted every invitation and travelled to France, Italy and twice to Japan.  He vacationed in the Caribbean and visited his brother in Buenos Aires, bought a stylish flat in Manhattan and a summer house in Connecticut.  Albers does not, unfortunately, discuss his long 1974 journey to Southeast Asia, Australia and the South Seas.

In old age Kertész developed Ménière’s disease (which also had tormented Jonathan Swift), a disorder of the inner ear that caused tinnitus, deafness, vertigo and loss of balance.  He also suffered from gout and Parkinson’s disease, which made his hands tremble when he held a camera.  His wife Elizabeth had surgery for lung and colon cancers.  Monet had painted his wife on her deathbed; and when Elizabeth died in October 1977, Kertész also photographed her corpse.  He wrongly blamed her incurable disease on American doctors, and declared that if he were religious, he’d stop believing in God.

He donated all his work to the French government.  In 2024 his Satiric Dancer—a woman lying on a couch, seen from above and next to a nude statue, flinging her arms and legs out in different directions—sold at auction for an astonishing $567,000.

Kertesz’ four best photos deserve more attention than they receive in Albers’ book.  Forced March to the Front, 1915 (above):  In the top background of the photo a flat tree-bordered landscape appears under a vast grey sky.  The soldiers’ vertical rifles look like an extension of their legs.  One soldier at the end of the endless line turns toward Kertész and shows his anxious face.  A sergeant guides the long row of men who curve off to the right, march to their deaths and disappear out of the picture.

We Lost the War, 1918:  No combat or action appears in this photo.  Instead, two huge black oxen trudge along a flat dirt road, past barren trees and a row of white fence posts.  The beasts are followed by a soldier in boots, cap and uniform; and by a woman in a broad black skirt burdened by a huge basket of white cloth.  The vertical posts echo the legs of the oxen and soldier, and one post looks like the animal’s left horn.  Like Forced March, the figures are seen from the rear with their faces hidden.  The V-shaped forks in the barren trees suggest the separation of the oxen and isolation of the two pedestrians.  The animals leave a trail of shit on the way back to their defeated country.  Unlike Albers, I don’t see any hope in this saturnine image.

Young woman driving a race car
1928, André Kertész

Actress at the Wheel of her Roadster, 1928:  The long-spoked spare wheel is strapped to the side of the long, strapped hood.  The driver’s face and nose are narrow, her lips pressed tight in concentration.  Wearing an aviator’s cap, long checkered scarf, leather jacket and gloves, she grips the steering wheel, turns it slightly to her right, tilts her head and shifts her eyes to get a better view of the road.  Kertész’s photo resembles Tamara de Lempicka’s painting Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti (1929).

ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (1894-1985) , Manahattan Bridge, 1937

Manhattan Bridge, New York, 1947:  On a quiet Sunday afternoon a desolate, paper-littered waterfront street in Brooklyn leads to the bridge over the East River.  A thick solid overpass connects two rows of high factory buildings above the empty street, with one parked black car facing forward.  The overpass, buildings and street form a tight, four-cornered frame around the H-shaped steel and thick cables that support the bridge.  The steel slices across the center of the photo and seems to support the buildings.  Three black birds flutter up and escape into the dull grey sky.  The birds do not suggest, as Albers states, “nature, freedom and the creative spirit”.  As she also writes more perceptively, “His New York pictures speak of estrangement.  The city was crushing his soul.”  This photo actually portrays the unseen modern urban man trapped between inhuman stone and steel.  W. H. Auden captures the mood in “As I Walked Out One Evening”: “The lovers they were gone; / The clocks had ceased their chiming, /And the deep river ran on.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-three books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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