André Kertész

André Kertész (1894 – 1985) a seminal figure in twentieth-century photography, began his brilliant and innovative career in 1912 and worked seventy-three years, across Hungary, Paris, and New York. Neither a pure Surrealist nor a strict photojournalist, he combined a street photographer’s wry humor with the formal sensibility of a modernist. His ability to construct lyrical images infused with wit and insight remained a constant throughout his long career. His use of unconventional vantage points, unexpected lighting, reflection, distortion, and radical cropping produced some of the most iconic photographs in the history of the medium. He would influence a generation of photographers, including Bill Brandt, Robert Capa, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who famously said, “Whatever we have done, Kertész did first.”

Born in Budapest in 1894 and trained for a career in finance, Kertész bought his first camera in 1912 while working as a clerk at the Budapest Stock Exchange. His early images of family members and the Hungarian countryside reflect his engagement with contemporary Hungarian artists during a period of extraordinary cultural growth. Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914, he took his camera to the front lines, and in 1917, while convalescing from a wound, made Underwater Swimmer, in which a body appears elongated and dissolved by the water. Kertész called it his first distortion. He moved to Paris in 1925, but his modernist approach had already begun to take shape.

In Paris, his pioneering vision brought him considerable success, and his approach helped define the emerging language of photojournalism in Europe and, subsequently, America. Over eleven years, he made the work for which he remains best known, including Chez Mondrian (1926), Satiric Dancer (1926), and Fork (1928). Moving among the artists of Montparnasse, he photographed the studios of Piet Mondrian and Constantin Brâncuși as portraits made in the sitter’s absence. He introduced Brassaï to photography and published four books, beginning with Enfants in 1933, the year he made Distortions, a series of nudes photographed through funhouse mirrors for the magazine Le Sourire.

Kertész left for New York in 1936, and from the beginning his career in the United States proved difficult. American editors found his images too poetic for their stories and layouts, and, unable to return to Europe after the outbreak of war, he was classified as an enemy alien and warned not to photograph in the streets. Day of Paris, published in 1945 and now regarded as a canonical photobook, did not change his position. He worked under contract to Condé Nast until 1962, years he later described as his “lost years.”

At sixty-eight, he broke the contract and returned fully to his art. John Szarkowski’s 1964 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art restored the reputation he had enjoyed in Europe, and Szarkowski wrote that Kertész’s work, perhaps more than any other photographer’s, defined the direction in which modern European photography developed. From his apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue, he continued photographing Washington Square Park through the window. After his wife, Elizabeth, died in 1977, he turned to the Polaroid SX-70 and to color, working until his death in 1985.

In 1984, Kertész gave his negatives and archive to the French Ministry of Culture, a donation of more than 100,000 negatives now held by the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie in Paris. Prints signed by Kertész generally do not bear the estate stamp, which was applied only after his death to identify later prints as originals.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented his work in Between Order and Chaos: André Kertész and M. C. Escher (2026), The Visual Language of Modernity (2023), REWIND (2021), André Kertész (2019), Inscribed (2015), de-FORMATIONS (2015), Night (2011), CITY VIEWS, curated by Michael Wolf (2010), DISCOVERIES (2010), and Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer (2025).