André Kertész

Reflecting back on his decades as a trailblazing modernist photographer, André Kertész remarked, 'Technique isn’t important. Technique is in the blood. Events and mood are more important than good light and the happening is what is important.' Indeed, since moving from his native Hungary to Paris in 1924, Kertész’s kept his eye on the zeitgeist. As the core of European Modernism, Paris was the magnet for revolutionary thinkers such as Kertész. From Marc Chagall to Man Ray, the city served as inspiration and reflection of the 'events and mood' that would become the benchmarks in the avant-garde. For photographers, this was a particularly fertile period. Released from the painterly demands of Pictorialism, modernist photography lent way to abstraction and experimentation, as beautifully exemplified by Distortion No. 6.

Kertész first experimented with illusory photography in 1930 with his fellow artist Carlo Rim. It was not until 1933, however, until commissioned by Vu magazine’s renowned founder Lucien Vogel, that Kertész created his celebrated series. Comprised of 200 negatives and taken over two weeks, Distortions depicted the models Najinskaya Verackhatz and Nadia Kasine posing nude in front of 'fun house mirrors' that abstracted their figures to varying degrees. At times warped, elongated, compressed and undulating, Distortions defied representation in favor of conceptualism. 'I do not document anything,' Kertész stated, 'I give an interpretation.' In keeping with the radical and subversive times that typified Paris at the time, the images celebrate the reconfiguration of the human form. Of the series, twelve images were published in Le Sourire, a men’s magazine, in March of 1933. Despite this original literary context, the Distortions series far transcended its initial sexual contextualization to become one of the most recognizable and celebrated bodies of work in modernist photography. Indeed, four years later, the works were featured in The Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition History of Photography.

Another print of this image can be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.