Sometimes you feel compelled to talk about things that you know very little about. Usually, this stems from some sort of intense passion that is roused; regardless of whether or not you’re fully informed, nothing is going to stop you from sharing your opinion. Often (and for obvious reasons), this is a bad thing. But hopefully in this post, where I will indeed be talking about something I don’t feel fully equipped to talk about, it won’t be of any harm, because all I wish to do is share my enthusiasm for a particular artist: André Kertész.
I’m certainly no expert when it comes to photography, either creating it or evaluating it. I have very little education in the field, having only ever taken one photography class in my time spent in college. But I’m most certainly an enthusiast of the art. Often, when I visit bookstores it’s not the literature that draws my attention, but rather the books on photography. There’s something fascinating to me about the freezing of one moment in time (unless, of course, you’re using time-lapse photography). If the Russian formalists were right, and the purpose of art is to make known things somehow new and extraordinary, then photography is perhaps the most perfect art at doing just that: by isolating one moment from the "real" world and making it the sole content of the work, it demands that moment be reevaluated. Because we know photography records things that actually exist (though it’s by no means a record of "truth." Photography is usually just as much a fictional fabrication as any other art), it feels to viewers as though all the importance of the world has been squeezed into the frame of this one solitary shot, and suddenly, everything erupts into life. When we see a door in a film or a story, so often we find out what is behind it. But in photography, that door is just a door and it will always remain closed. And thus, by being exactly what it is, a door, it ceases to be a door, and instead is becomes the infinite possibilities of what may exist beyond it.
And this feeling is why I love André Kertész’s work. Everytime I look at one of his photographs, some mystery presents itself to me, and in that mystery lies everything that is beautiful about the world. We spend all of our lives searching for meaning, and in the end, it’s the search that means everything to begin with. Kertész’s photography, for me, more than any other photographer’s work, reveals this fact, that the mystery is the meaning, the meaning the mystery, and invites you to search the infinity caught within the frame.
Perhaps on a somewhat less metaphysical level, his photographs are quite simply breathtaking. I’m a self-admitted aesthete, and Kertész’s photography never ceases to catch me off-guard with the way it demonstrates that Kertész understands the world is an aesthetic experience, and he is able to translate that experience in such a pure way. So, feast your eyes on some of his photography.
This is a very small sampling of this man's incredible work. I'd urge you to seek more out. Who is the person behind the textured glass? Who is the solitary man with the umbrella? Why does the woman in the top hat seem so disconnected from the figure in the foreground? And who is this figure? All questions without answer, and therein lies the beauty of Kertész's world, of our world.
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