Caught In The Middle

The 2009 Hungarian Press Photography Awards have been announced. The overall winner is a stunning series of Roma (Gypsy) grieving by the Hungarian photographer Béla Szandelszky. My favorite is the one of three woman grieving. The site is in Hungarian but Google translate does a reasonable job (to English anyway). And of course there is the inevitable Flash navigation to come to grips with. This means it is very hard to link to the actual photos themselves, but perhaps the point. Nonetheless this form of navigation is an irritant.

All the photos demonstrate that the rich tradition of Hungarian photography that includes André Kertész, Robert Capa, László Moholy-Nagy and Marton Munkácsi to name but a few of the greatest photographers of last century, is very much alive and well.

Indeed the Szandelszky series marks almost a century of Hungarian ethno-photography when Kertész began photographing local villages, Roma and Hungarian village, and urban, life in general.

This is the first of series of articles in which I will look at the lives of famous Hungarians.  What do I mean by famous?  I mean those Hungarians who made a contribution beyond their shores and who influenced the world in some significant manner in science or similar field.  I guess you could say it those lives made a difference to others.

I have chosen as the first Hungarian live to examine that of André Kertész, one of the greatest photographers of the 20^th century.  He is regarded as a seminal figure in the development of the documentary style of photography, or photojournalism, the telling of everyday life of everyday people.  The 20^th century is really the democratic century: the time when the “common man” would find his true place.  The photographer who captured and echoed this imperative best and led the way for all photographers who followed was Kertész. His career as a photographer was the longest of any of the greats of the last century and there is no other who has some many great photos whether, portrait, still life, landscape or abstract.

There was a peculiar Hungarian quality to his work; there is a romanticism lyricism in his photos that echoes the Hungary he grew up in: both in Budapest where he was born and in the countryside where he spent many happy days. Kertész was a poet in the great Hungarian tradition, but he was a poet of light; he created images of simple, everyday life and objects that constantly reveal themselves to the viewer, that draw you in to the photo and transport you, mysteriously and dreamily to another world.

Take for example, the photo Montmartre, taken in1927.  We are looking down some stairs, the shadows of the railings casting peculiar, disparate angles, unsettling the viewer. At the bottom of the stairs, beside a lamplight, sits a man, waiting: what for we can’t know, perhaps a beggar waiting to accost passers-by, perhaps just a man, tired and watching the world go by.  A woman is walking briskly towards the steps, striding forward.  She seems almost to be veering away from the man, as if sensing danger.  There is a feeling of menace in this photo.  We can only imagine.  The light, the diagonals, the everydayness of the scene is pure Kertész: the photo touches our heart, our spirit, our mind. Pure poetry.

Were did this genius spring from? Kertész was born at the height of the golden age of Budapest, in July 1894. The city he grew up was bustling, prosperous and confident. Everywhere you looked there was energy, excitement, in the cafes, along the tree-lined avenues, the ring roads, the promenades along the Danube and in the vibrant buildings that sprung up celebrating its Hungarianness and a thousand years of history.  This was the city of Krúdy, Ady, Bartók, and Molnár. Of Hungary’s seven Noble prize winners, five were born, like Kertész, in Budapest, between 1875 and 1905. Kertész first picked up a camera as an 18 year old and would spend the next ten years developing his craft in Hungary, capturing light and the Magyar world in which he inhabited.  His early photos are of village life, of the puszta and of his beloved Budapest.  His unorthodox approach, his experimenting with angles and light also began here. Take for example, his Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, 1917 which he took while recuperating from wounds suffered while fighting on the Serbian front.  Here we see light, distortion, irregularity, yet a lyricism and softness, all traits of Kertész.  At the age 23 he was a fully mature photographer, confident and certain, his genius already formed and evident.

In 1925, with a social and political climate unsympathetic to artistic creativity, he moved to Paris and like many other Hungarians saw in this city echoes of their own Budapest.  In Paris he experimented with distortion, his nudes in particular. But he captured Paris and the life of the artists, all brimming with new ideas such as Surrealism and Dadaism.  This spilled over into his own work, including a series of distorted nudes that broke new ground. The Fork, or La Fourchette taken in 1928 is one of his most famous from his Paris years.

His profound lyricism found its truest expression in the photos of him and his wife, Elisabeth. She was the love of his life and they were together for nearly all of their adult lives.  Perhaps his most profound picture of the two of them is entitled, Elisabeth and I taken in 1931. The full-frame version shows him sitting beside Elisabeth, his arm around her, his hand resting on her shoulder, while he looks adoringly at her. She however is looking straight at the camera, as if accepting that her world is also the world of the camera.  While moving and tender in itself, Kertész took the photo one step further by cropping it.  Now we only see the left side of her face, staring at the camera, and his hand on shoulder.  This has been described as one of greatest photos of the bond between a man and woman. Its strength and beauty lies in its utter simplicity.  But I think only of Ady and his great love poem, I guard your eyes/ Őrizem a szemed when I look at this photo.  As I think Kertész must have too: This is a Hungarian love poem created with light. When Elizabeth died in 1977 he reprised this photo (titled For Elizabeth) by photographing the cropped version of the photo and adding a wreath around his hand on the original photo. You can almost feel his grief.  With my old man’s wrinkled hand,/with my old man’s squinting eyes,/let me hold your lovely hand,/let me guard your lovely eyes.

In 1936 Kertész and Elizabeth moved to America.  The storm clouds of Fascism were growing darker and there was less and less work available for such an innovative and apolitical photographer as Kertész.  His Jewish background did not help either.  For many decades he would not receive the recognition he had in Paris and he spent years working as a freelance photographer for magazines such as Look, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Town and Country. He regarded these as his “dead” years, describing his work from 1949 until 1961 as “worthless hackwork”. He retired and embarked on a series of personal projects; including photographing the view was is the twelfth-story Fifth Avenue apartment.  He was angry at being ignored and misunderstood He was after all, a European, steeped in the language and art of the Old World, and not in the brash, commercial, yet prudish world of America.  He was bitter at his lack of recognition. But such was his strength, and talent, that he resurfaced in his late sixties and started to receive the recognition he richly deserved.   His photo Washington Square is classic Kertész, unorthodox, lines and angles with a single figure, alone, going somewhere.

My personal favourite from his latter years is Martinique from 1972. The composition is simplicity itself, the view from a balcony looking out to sea, the photo divided by the frosty glass door, behind which we see a dark, mysterious figure, matching the mood of the dark clouds and the slightly angular horizon.

He would visit Hungary again in the 1980s shortly before his death in 1986 at the age of 91.  The photos from that time show the same love of the everydayüness, the landscape and the people.  By this time he had received the recognition he deserved; prizes and accolades poured to him. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased 100 prints from him in 1984, the largest ever acquisition of photographs from a living artist by a museum.  Andre Kertész is now regarded as a great artist of the 20^th Century, a genius who captured the essence of the everyday life in a unique, yet Hungarian manner.