The first major retrospective of the celebrated photographer offers a complete overview of his life and career, from his early work in Hungary to his later use of "distortions," with essays by Laszlo Beke, Dominique Baque, and Jane Livingston. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
A powerful collection of the luminous last work by one of the true giants of twentieth-century photography. After the death of his wife, André Kertész consoled himself by taking up a new camera, the Polaroid SX70. As with earlier equipment, he mastered the camera and produced a provocative body of work that both honored his wife and lifted him out of depression. Here Kertész dips into his reserves one last time, tapping new people, ideas, and tools to generate a whole new body of work through which he transforms from a broken man into a youthful artist. 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 Almost entirely unpublished work, these photographs are a testament to the genius of the photographer’s eye as manifested in the simple Polaroid.
Kertesz created some of the most acclaimed photographs of the twentieth century, and the J. Paul Getty Museum is fortunate to own a wide selection of his work. This volume - the first in the Museum's new In Focus series, which is devoted to photographers whose work is particularly well represented in the Getty - presents a handsome selection from the 164 Kertesz photographs in the Museum's collection. The photographs are accompanied by commentaries by Weston Naef, the Getty's Curator of Photographs.
"In October 1963, photographer André Kertész returned to Paris, almost thirty years after his emigration to the United States, for a retrospective of his work held at the Biblioth̀eque Nationale. Over a period of two and a half months, he devoted his days to photographing the ephemeral autumnal beauty of Paris--from Montmartre, Notre-Dame, and the Jardins du Luxembourg, to the Canal Saint-Martin and the banks of the Seine. Through the lens of his Leica camera, he produced more than 1,500 negatives and 313 color slides. From this wealth of images, he selected fifty-nine of his best photographs and crafted them into a ferroprussiate process blueprint for a book. This exceptional body of work remained unpublished during his lifetime but is reproduced here in its complete form for the first time, as the photographer intended."--Jacket.
"This book is a retrospective of André Kertész's long career and contains all of his best known works: Hungarian scenes, classic photographs of Mondrian's staircase, portraits of his artist and writer friends, as well as his famous Surrealist distortions."--Bookseller's description.