NUDES

“I write with light,” Andre Kertész once said of his work. In one of the medium’s longest and most productive careers, Kertész created a vast, lyrical narrative that helped shape the history of photography. He used the camera to question, record, and preserve his relationships to the world and to his art.

His personality was never dominated by the ideas of others, for his eyes had always been primarily attuned and responsive to the human element in all work. He always maintained that his photographs were in an important sense what he felt. His own constructivism was achieved almost without mechanical objects, almost exclusively by reference to the hand built, the man made. Especially the nude photographs, as named “Distortions”, that he was experimenting with were harshly rejected at the start. This deeply hurt Kertész, because for him his photographs “represented his perpetual research which photography permitted.”

© Cigdem Mirol

Provenance

Gift of Peter and Suzann Matthews to the Art Institute of Chicago

Literature

Ducrot, Distortions, André Kertész, n.p.