VERVE Gallery of Photography Presents
Cy DeCosse
A Retrospective
Opening Reception: Friday, July 8, 5-7pm
Exhibition is on view Friday, June 24 – Saturday, September 3, 2011
Conversation with Cy DeCosse: Saturday, July 9, 2pm
Location: VERVE Gallery of Photography
VERVE Gallery of Photography is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition by gallery artist and acclaimed photographer, Cy DeCosse. The exhibition showcases Cy’s work for the past eighteen years. DeCosse works in alternative processes: platinum palladium, photogravure, and gum dichromate printing. His work will grace the entire gallery for the duration of the summer.
The public reception for this exhibition is on Friday, July 8, 2011 from 5-7pm. There will be a conversation with Cy DeCosse about his work at VERVE Gallery on Saturday, July 9, 2011 from 2-3pm. The exhibition is on view Friday, June 24, 2011 through Saturday, September 3, 2011.
Cy DeCosse’s philosophy about a picture is simple: “A photograph should be interesting to look at. I like to get in close so you see things you’ve never seen before.” He does just that and he does so with extraordinary craftsmanship. His images whisk us away to lush gardens to imagine, to dream, to delight in the sublime beauty of his artistry. His work has a decidedly European flavor, a special touch he learned and explored while on a Fulbright grant in Florence. Cy’s work is unequivocally different. He is truly an alchemist in that his work is produced in alternative photographic mediums that become handcrafted platinum/palladium or three-color dichromate pigment prints. Cy discovers the extraordinary in ordinary objects by his use of light: lateral light, front light, back light, daylight, and moonlight. “Tuscan Lemons”, “Pears”, “Water Lily”, “Three Asian Onions”, “Lotus”, the “King and Queen of the Night” as seen through Cy’s inspired eye, capture what Alexander Pope calls “grace beyond the reach of art”.
DeCosse’s most recent work is a four-volume book set on the classic Greek elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The photos in these books range from intimate studio photography to portraiture and landscapes in locations as distant as Iceland and the Sahara Desert.
Cy DeCosse was born in Valley City, North Dakota in 1929. He won a scholarship to the Minneapolis School of Art and Design where he bought his first camera, an Exa, and turned his coal cellar into a darkroom. After graduation, in 1954, Cy won a Fulbright Scholarship to Florence. While in Italy he studied with the gifted Renzo Maggini at the Instituto d’Arte di Porta Romana. Renzo Maggini provided Cy’s only formal photographic instruction. Cy then went on to a successful career in book publishing producing highly photographic “how-to” books on various topics many of which were translated into 17 languages.
With the sale of his company in 1994, Cy returned to his first love, photography. Cy lives and works in Minnesota. In 2001, with Keith Taylor as printer, the two began the revival of the gum dichromate technique, an alternative process that produces a color print of extraordinary beauty.
DeCosse’s work is in numerous public collections including the England Royal Trust and the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. His work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. There are four books containing Cy’s work. The first is a limited edition book published by The Journal of Contemporary Photography: Volume IV, entitled: Gardens of DeCosse (2000). The book is devoted exclusively to the work of the artist. The images in the book range from the quiet morning’s light falling on freshly picked vegetables to the riotous energy of flowers in full bloom. The second is a catalog for an exhibition held at the Accademia Delle Arti Del Disegno Firenze, Italy in October, 2001, entitled: Cy DeCosse: Play of the Light (2001). His third book is entitled Flowers and Food (2009) and it contains DeCosse’s botanical photographs in Gum Dichromate & Platinum. Florence by Cy DeCosse (2009) is a book of portraits that Cy dedicates to his muse, the city of Florence and its people.
CONTACT INFORMATION FOR CY DeCOSSE
Email: studio.41@mac.com
Phone: 612-721-2286
CONTACT INFORMATION FOR VERVE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Jennifer Schlesinger, Director
219 E. Marcy Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501
Email: director@vervegallery.com
Phone: 505-982-5009 Fax: 505-982-9111
Download the full version with images here.
06 June 2011
17 March 2011
Abadzic, Carrillo, Vassilev Show Press Release
For images, please check out our website and the exhibitions page.
VERVE Gallery of Photography Presents
STANKO ABADŽIC
MANUEL CARRILLO
JACKO VASSILEV
Opening Reception: Friday, April 15, 2011, 5-7pm
Exhibition is on view Friday, April 8 - through Saturday, June 16, 2011
Conversation with Jacko Vassilev
Saturday, April 16, 2011, 2pm
Location: VERVE Gallery of Photography
VERVE Gallery of Photography is pleased to present work by Eastern Europeans Stanko Abadžic and Jacko Vassilev, both of whom have worked documenting their respective cultures in stunning black and white, gelatin silver prints. Croatian born Stanko Abadžic’s second exhibition at VERVE debuts his playful new work from Berlin, Paris and Croatia. Bulgarian artist Jacko Vassilev brings to Santa Fe, for the first time, the renowned series that documented his Bulgarian culture from 1971 until 1993, when the country was under communist totalitarianism. Lastly, VERVE will be presenting newly acquired work by the only non-contemporary artist in our stable, Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989) from Mexico City.
The public reception for this exhibition takes place on Friday, April 15, 2011 from 5-7pm. There will be a conversation with Jacko Vassilev about his work at VERVE Gallery on Saturday, April 16 from 2-3pm.
The exhibition is on view from Friday, April 8, 2011 through Saturday, June 16, 2011.
STANKO ABADŽIC
Stanko Abadžic brings us new images from Berlin, Paris and Croatia. Croatian-born Abadžic is a street photographer known for irony, humor and satire in his juxtapositions. This new work continues this winning formula.
Abadžic’s work is characterized by strong contrasts of light and dark, an interest in patterns and geometric forms created by long shadows, brick or cobblestone streets, intricate ironwork designs, fences, and other grid-like elements. He seeks out children playing, people on bicycles or lingering at street cafes, and has an eye for irony. There is a strong sense of nostalgia and transience running through his work, due, no doubt, to his experiences as a displaced person.
Stanko Abadžic was born in 1952 in Vukovar, Croatia. At the age of 15 he began teaching himself photography. After marriage, he worked as a reporter and photojournalist to support his family. When the Croatian War of Independence broke out in 1991, Abadžic left everything and fled with his family to Germany for what he hoped would be a brief stay. After four difficult years, during which he took few photographs, Stanko and his family were denied German citizenship and forced to leave. He moved to Prague. Abadžic’s move brought with it a rebirth as he began a new series of photographs with a medium-format camera. With this new camera, he began to develop his visual eye in earnest.
Abadžic was able to return with his family to Croatia in 2002, settling in the capital of Zagreb. He continues to photograph in Prague and also shoots along the Adriatic. Abadžic has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik, Museum of Modern Art Rijeka, Mimara Museum in Zagreb, and various galleries in Japan, Argentina Prague, Berlin, and other Eastern European cities. He is represented in the United States by John Cleary (Houston, TX), Verve Gallery (Santa Fe, NM) and Contemporary Works (Pennsylvania).
JACKO VASSILEV
Jacko Vassilev's work gives us a compelling look at peasant life in the Bulgarian countryside during the communist regime (1971 to 1993). His images communicate to us the strength of the human spirit that endures in meager living conditions and during political oppression.
His portraits of fellow Bulgarians presents us with a full spectrum of human emotion and culture, from heartbreak to joy. Vassilev captures, with sensitivity and respect, the tumultuous history and political struggles of his people. His images of everyday people and everyday life in provincial towns throughout the rural countryside are a journey back into time.
"I really wanted to preserve all we have in Bulgaria, especially the big army of the old generation. Those people have something that the young generation does not have. Their spirit I have seen in their eyes, in their hands, and on their faces. The grand and endless expressions on their faces are so natural, so real - sometime I wish my photography could have smell and sound. At least it is something that will remain for future generations. That is why I photograph man.” – Jacko Vassilev
When Jacko was photographing this project, his darkroom was raided. He was accused by the regime of presenting the "bad" side of Bulgaria. Of this, he says, “Photography is a big art, and no one, no regimes, no party can stop the creation of it. I was keeping all my negatives and black and white art prints hidden, hoping one day my son or his children will be able to bring them out of secrecy. How blessed I am, that I have survived and I am able to show them in person. No more arrests for photographing my people, no more destroyed films and broken cameras. Today I am living in my dreams. I AM A FREE MAN. I can speak free without censoring my political vocabulary; I can travel anywhere I would like...and I am having friends from all over the world!"
Vassilev holds a Diploma from the Bulgarian Ministry of Education’s Julius Fuchik Technical School for Polygraphy & Photography. He was awarded a Diploma of Art Photography from the Ministry of Culture and the Bulgarian Photography Society in 1990. Jacko Vassilev’s photographs are included in the permanent public art collections of the International Center for Photography in New York City, and the European Center of Photography in Paris. Other prestigious museum, private and corporate collections that hold his work include: The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas; The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama; and The Bayly Art Museum in Charlottesville, Virginia. Vassilev has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the world including Yugoslavia, England, Germany, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Venezuela, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland, Belgium, Hungary, Australia, Estonia, France, Rumania, Canada, Holland and the United States. Vassilev’s work has been written about extensively in art and photography publications worldwide. He has published a book of his photographs entitled Bulgarians, 1994 by Contrejour Publishers in Paris.
MANUEL CARRILLO
This exhibition of Manuel Carrillo, a legendary 20th Century Mexican photographer, includes newly acquired images shown for the first time. This body of work consists of Carrillo’s historic photographic masterpieces of Mexican culture in the period between 1950 and 1970. Images in this exhibition include explorations of daily life in central and coastal Mexico that include portraits of children, laborers, fishermen, and farmers.
Manuel Carrillo’s work was inspired by the American Modernist artists of his time, such as Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand and others that informed the aesthetics and politics of his photographic work.
“Manuel Carrillo’s relationship to his subject matter is a position based on his own cultural identity as a Mexican by birth and an American by processes of binational crossings that led to his induction as an honorary citizen of El Paso, Texas in 1980 by the Photographic Society of America. This position allowed him to move in and out of fixed constructs of identity that may have otherwise limited his visual interpretations.” [1]
Carrillo’s compassion, sensitivity and his understanding of a universal connection to the shared human experience produced stunning, poetic images of the Mexican culture that he passionately identified with as his own. “Mi Pueblo”(My People), depicting daily life in rural Mexico, was the title of his first international exhibition held in 1960 in Chicago.
Born in Mexico City in 1906, Manuel Carrillo’s destiny as interpreter of his own people would not be revealed until almost half a century later. At the age of 16, in 1922 Carrillo left Mexico for New York where he pursued several odd jobs before becoming an Arthur Murray waltz and tango champion. During this period in New York, he settled down to work for the Wall Street firm of Neuss Hesslein and Co., but in 1930 he returned to his beloved Mexico. There he began working for one of the pioneers of the Mexican tourist industry Albert L. Bravo. Carrillo later abandoned that position to become the general agent for the Illinois Central Railroad’s office in Mexico City, where he stayed for thirty-six years, until his retirement. At the age of 49, he joined the Club Fotografico de Mexico and the Photographic Society of America, thus launching his career in Photography. His first international exhibition, titled, “Mi Pueblo” (“My People”), was held in 1960 at the Chicago Public Library and depicted daily life in rural Mexico. Since 1975, Carrillo’s work has been seen in 209 individual exhibitions and 27 group exhibits in Mexico, the United States and around the world. His work has been published in a variety of photographic anthologies and journals. Carrillo died in Mexico City in 1989 at the age of 83. His archives are held at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Library.
VERVE Gallery of Photography Presents
STANKO ABADŽIC
MANUEL CARRILLO
JACKO VASSILEV
Opening Reception: Friday, April 15, 2011, 5-7pm
Exhibition is on view Friday, April 8 - through Saturday, June 16, 2011
Conversation with Jacko Vassilev
Saturday, April 16, 2011, 2pm
Location: VERVE Gallery of Photography
VERVE Gallery of Photography is pleased to present work by Eastern Europeans Stanko Abadžic and Jacko Vassilev, both of whom have worked documenting their respective cultures in stunning black and white, gelatin silver prints. Croatian born Stanko Abadžic’s second exhibition at VERVE debuts his playful new work from Berlin, Paris and Croatia. Bulgarian artist Jacko Vassilev brings to Santa Fe, for the first time, the renowned series that documented his Bulgarian culture from 1971 until 1993, when the country was under communist totalitarianism. Lastly, VERVE will be presenting newly acquired work by the only non-contemporary artist in our stable, Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989) from Mexico City.
The public reception for this exhibition takes place on Friday, April 15, 2011 from 5-7pm. There will be a conversation with Jacko Vassilev about his work at VERVE Gallery on Saturday, April 16 from 2-3pm.
The exhibition is on view from Friday, April 8, 2011 through Saturday, June 16, 2011.
STANKO ABADŽIC
Stanko Abadžic brings us new images from Berlin, Paris and Croatia. Croatian-born Abadžic is a street photographer known for irony, humor and satire in his juxtapositions. This new work continues this winning formula.
Abadžic’s work is characterized by strong contrasts of light and dark, an interest in patterns and geometric forms created by long shadows, brick or cobblestone streets, intricate ironwork designs, fences, and other grid-like elements. He seeks out children playing, people on bicycles or lingering at street cafes, and has an eye for irony. There is a strong sense of nostalgia and transience running through his work, due, no doubt, to his experiences as a displaced person.
Stanko Abadžic was born in 1952 in Vukovar, Croatia. At the age of 15 he began teaching himself photography. After marriage, he worked as a reporter and photojournalist to support his family. When the Croatian War of Independence broke out in 1991, Abadžic left everything and fled with his family to Germany for what he hoped would be a brief stay. After four difficult years, during which he took few photographs, Stanko and his family were denied German citizenship and forced to leave. He moved to Prague. Abadžic’s move brought with it a rebirth as he began a new series of photographs with a medium-format camera. With this new camera, he began to develop his visual eye in earnest.
Abadžic was able to return with his family to Croatia in 2002, settling in the capital of Zagreb. He continues to photograph in Prague and also shoots along the Adriatic. Abadžic has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik, Museum of Modern Art Rijeka, Mimara Museum in Zagreb, and various galleries in Japan, Argentina Prague, Berlin, and other Eastern European cities. He is represented in the United States by John Cleary (Houston, TX), Verve Gallery (Santa Fe, NM) and Contemporary Works (Pennsylvania).
JACKO VASSILEV
Jacko Vassilev's work gives us a compelling look at peasant life in the Bulgarian countryside during the communist regime (1971 to 1993). His images communicate to us the strength of the human spirit that endures in meager living conditions and during political oppression.
His portraits of fellow Bulgarians presents us with a full spectrum of human emotion and culture, from heartbreak to joy. Vassilev captures, with sensitivity and respect, the tumultuous history and political struggles of his people. His images of everyday people and everyday life in provincial towns throughout the rural countryside are a journey back into time.
"I really wanted to preserve all we have in Bulgaria, especially the big army of the old generation. Those people have something that the young generation does not have. Their spirit I have seen in their eyes, in their hands, and on their faces. The grand and endless expressions on their faces are so natural, so real - sometime I wish my photography could have smell and sound. At least it is something that will remain for future generations. That is why I photograph man.” – Jacko Vassilev
When Jacko was photographing this project, his darkroom was raided. He was accused by the regime of presenting the "bad" side of Bulgaria. Of this, he says, “Photography is a big art, and no one, no regimes, no party can stop the creation of it. I was keeping all my negatives and black and white art prints hidden, hoping one day my son or his children will be able to bring them out of secrecy. How blessed I am, that I have survived and I am able to show them in person. No more arrests for photographing my people, no more destroyed films and broken cameras. Today I am living in my dreams. I AM A FREE MAN. I can speak free without censoring my political vocabulary; I can travel anywhere I would like...and I am having friends from all over the world!"
Vassilev holds a Diploma from the Bulgarian Ministry of Education’s Julius Fuchik Technical School for Polygraphy & Photography. He was awarded a Diploma of Art Photography from the Ministry of Culture and the Bulgarian Photography Society in 1990. Jacko Vassilev’s photographs are included in the permanent public art collections of the International Center for Photography in New York City, and the European Center of Photography in Paris. Other prestigious museum, private and corporate collections that hold his work include: The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas; The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama; and The Bayly Art Museum in Charlottesville, Virginia. Vassilev has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the world including Yugoslavia, England, Germany, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Venezuela, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland, Belgium, Hungary, Australia, Estonia, France, Rumania, Canada, Holland and the United States. Vassilev’s work has been written about extensively in art and photography publications worldwide. He has published a book of his photographs entitled Bulgarians, 1994 by Contrejour Publishers in Paris.
MANUEL CARRILLO
This exhibition of Manuel Carrillo, a legendary 20th Century Mexican photographer, includes newly acquired images shown for the first time. This body of work consists of Carrillo’s historic photographic masterpieces of Mexican culture in the period between 1950 and 1970. Images in this exhibition include explorations of daily life in central and coastal Mexico that include portraits of children, laborers, fishermen, and farmers.
Manuel Carrillo’s work was inspired by the American Modernist artists of his time, such as Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand and others that informed the aesthetics and politics of his photographic work.
“Manuel Carrillo’s relationship to his subject matter is a position based on his own cultural identity as a Mexican by birth and an American by processes of binational crossings that led to his induction as an honorary citizen of El Paso, Texas in 1980 by the Photographic Society of America. This position allowed him to move in and out of fixed constructs of identity that may have otherwise limited his visual interpretations.” [1]
Carrillo’s compassion, sensitivity and his understanding of a universal connection to the shared human experience produced stunning, poetic images of the Mexican culture that he passionately identified with as his own. “Mi Pueblo”(My People), depicting daily life in rural Mexico, was the title of his first international exhibition held in 1960 in Chicago.
Born in Mexico City in 1906, Manuel Carrillo’s destiny as interpreter of his own people would not be revealed until almost half a century later. At the age of 16, in 1922 Carrillo left Mexico for New York where he pursued several odd jobs before becoming an Arthur Murray waltz and tango champion. During this period in New York, he settled down to work for the Wall Street firm of Neuss Hesslein and Co., but in 1930 he returned to his beloved Mexico. There he began working for one of the pioneers of the Mexican tourist industry Albert L. Bravo. Carrillo later abandoned that position to become the general agent for the Illinois Central Railroad’s office in Mexico City, where he stayed for thirty-six years, until his retirement. At the age of 49, he joined the Club Fotografico de Mexico and the Photographic Society of America, thus launching his career in Photography. His first international exhibition, titled, “Mi Pueblo” (“My People”), was held in 1960 at the Chicago Public Library and depicted daily life in rural Mexico. Since 1975, Carrillo’s work has been seen in 209 individual exhibitions and 27 group exhibits in Mexico, the United States and around the world. His work has been published in a variety of photographic anthologies and journals. Carrillo died in Mexico City in 1989 at the age of 83. His archives are held at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Library.
[1] Revealing Personal Identity: The Indigenous Vision of Manuel Carrillo, 2003 (Writings from exhibition with Special Collections Department of the University of Texas at El Paso Library and the Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives.
CONTACT INFORMATION FOR STANKO ABADŽIC
Email: abadzicphoto@gmail.com
Phone: (Croatia) + 385 98 923 2530
CONTACT INFORMATION FOR JACKO VASSILEV
Email: jacko_vassilevart@yahoo.com
Phone: 323-376-0121
CONTACT INFORMATION FOR MANUEL CARRILLO: VERVE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Jennifer Schlesinger, Director
219 E. Marcy Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501
Email: jennifer@vervegallery.com
Phone: 505-982-5009 Fax: 505-982-9111
11 January 2011
2011 Center Awards: Call for entries!
2011 CALL FOR ENTRIES CENTER AWARDS
Review Santa Fe, Project Competition, Project Launch, and the Choice Awards.
Deadline January 27, 2011
Connections members receive $10 off any one submission
PROJECT COMPETITION
$5,000 cash, exhibition, publication in Fraction magazine, admission to Review Santa Fe, and more.
JURORS - Simon Baker, Curator of Photography, Tate, U.K.; Alexa Becker, Acquisitions Editor / Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg Publishers; Christina Cahill, Deputy Director, Editorial Reportage by Getty Images
PROJECT LAUNCH
$3,000 cash, exhibition, publication in Fraction magazine, admission to Review Santa Fe and more.
JUROR - Dewi Lewis, Publisher, Dewi Lewis Publishing, U.K.
CHOICE AWARDS
Exhibition at Center space, publication in Fraction magazine, gift certificate to Singer Editions fine art printing services
Curator's Choice - Erin O’Toole, Asst. Curator of Photography, SF Museum of Modern Art
Dealer's Choice - Dianne Vanderlip, Curator, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Editor's Choice - Todd James, Senior Photo Editor, National Geographic magazine
REVIEW SANTA FE
The premier juried portfolio review event in the country. Receive 9 portfolio reviews, inclusion in an on-line listing, receptions, a night of Portfolio Viewing and more; June 2-5, 2011 in Santa Fe, NM.
Review Santa Fe, Project Competition, Project Launch, and the Choice Awards.
Deadline January 27, 2011
Connections members receive $10 off any one submission
PROJECT COMPETITION
$5,000 cash, exhibition, publication in Fraction magazine, admission to Review Santa Fe, and more.
JURORS - Simon Baker, Curator of Photography, Tate, U.K.; Alexa Becker, Acquisitions Editor / Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg Publishers; Christina Cahill, Deputy Director, Editorial Reportage by Getty Images
PROJECT LAUNCH
$3,000 cash, exhibition, publication in Fraction magazine, admission to Review Santa Fe and more.
JUROR - Dewi Lewis, Publisher, Dewi Lewis Publishing, U.K.
CHOICE AWARDS
Exhibition at Center space, publication in Fraction magazine, gift certificate to Singer Editions fine art printing services
Curator's Choice - Erin O’Toole, Asst. Curator of Photography, SF Museum of Modern Art
Dealer's Choice - Dianne Vanderlip, Curator, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Editor's Choice - Todd James, Senior Photo Editor, National Geographic magazine
REVIEW SANTA FE
The premier juried portfolio review event in the country. Receive 9 portfolio reviews, inclusion in an on-line listing, receptions, a night of Portfolio Viewing and more; June 2-5, 2011 in Santa Fe, NM.
06 December 2010
Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection
An interesting article from the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.
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David Coleman, the Ransom Center’s Curator of Photography, leads a free gallery tour of Andre Kertesz: Beneath the Surface Mood.
André Kertész
Beneath the surface mood
A master of early 20th-century photography is given his biggest retrospective
Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
IN A remarkable, if chequered career spanning seven decades, André Kertész pioneered modern photography. Hovering between abstraction, constructivism and surrealism, yet avoiding any specific avant-garde movement, Kertész, a Hungarian-born émigré, was guided by a personal yet rigorous aesthetic. A new travelling show of 300 images, that begins at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, combines a mastery of shadow and light and eye for geometric shapes with a poetic yet unsentimental vision of life. The largest retrospective since the photographer’s death in 1985, it reveals like no show has done before the power of Kertész’s work.
Kertész photographed for himself rather than aiming for recognition: “[The camera] is very much a tool, to express and describe my life, the same way poets or writers describe their life experiences,” he explained. Armed with an ICA box camera, the 18-year-old Kertész in 1912 first set aside the rules of conventional photography when he captured a young man slumbering, slack-mouthed in a Budapest café in a tight, startlingly modern composition of intersecting diagonals formed by his pose and the newspapers suspended above.
“Sleeping Boy” is one of many images in the exhibition that show how Kertész, using his camera as a sketch book, created a new visual language. His intimate, reportage-style snapshots of fellow- conscripts in the Austro-Hungarian army during the first world war—writing letters, delousing, at the latrines, boxing or courting a peasant girl—anticipate 1950s photojournalism. The 1917 photograph (above), taken while Kertész was convalescing from typhoid, shows a swimmer as he glides gracefully through the water, its surface breaking up with ripples and reflections—one of the aesthetic themes of the modern movement in the 1920s. The profile and reflection of a second swimmer from 1919—cropped and inverted, as surrealists, such as Man Ray, would do a decade later— features Kertész’s athletic younger brother, Jeno, the model in many of his early photographs.
Born in Budapest to bourgeois Jewish parents in 1894, Andor Kertész said he never wanted to be anything but a photographer. A dreary job as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange prompted him to leave Hungary in 1925 for Paris, then the artistic capital of the world. There, he changed his name to André and applied his gift for capturing everyday life to producing photographic essays, notably for VU, France’s first illustrated magazine, launched in 1928, using his new 35mm portable Leica.
A highlight of the exhibition are his Paris “Portraits in Absence” pictures, which include Piet Mondrian’s “Glasses and Pipe”, a cropped composition of objects and spaces that captures the essence of the Dutch abstract artist’s austere modernist spirit. “Chez Mondrian”, now an emblem of avant-garde photography, shows how Kertész, using a vase, creates a formal harmony between geometric shapes, light and dark, flatness and the perspective created by the curved staircase in the background. Both images appeared in Kertész’s first solo exhibition at the Sacre du Printemps gallery.
Though always a shy man, Kertész was admired by fellow artists in Paris including Ray, Mondrian, Alexander Calder and a fellow-Hungarian, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He came to regret moving with his wife Elizabeth to New York in 1936, tempted by a job offer at the Keystone Agency. His contract proved short-lived. Keystone complained that his images “speak too much”, while Kertész resented the lack of artistic independence: “I interpret what I feel in a given moment. Not what I see, but what I feel,” he once explained.
Unlike Brassaï, his worldly, Paris-based compatriot, Kertész was a poor self-publicist. Hampered by a shaky knowledge of English and a dislike of studio work, he bluntly refused to co-operate with art directors’ ideas and his commissions dwindled. His 1937 image of a miniature cloud in a clear sky floating next to the brash new Rockefeller Centre in New York reflects his isolation, as does his “Melancholic Tulip” of 1939, drooping in a solitary vase.
In 1949, Kertész signed a lucrative, though unsatisfying, contract with House & Garden magazine, which used him to photograph the homes of celebrities such as Cole Porter and Peggy Guggenheim. In private, he took thousands of high-angle images from the balcony of his apartment overlooking Washington Square gardens, as he documented the changing seasons, revealing a particular fascination with snow scenes. One such image in the exhibition shows the formal perfection of the black branches of the trees, with a lone figure silhouetted against the white.
A turning point came in 1963, a year after the 68-year-old Kertész retired from House & Garden. The photographer was offered a show at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Back in France, he found some old boxes of vintage prints and negatives from his youth in Budapest and Paris that had been kept by his French friend and agent, Jacqueline Paouillac. Kertész’s recovered archive at last brought him recognition as a seminal figure in photography. This exhibition, which will introduce his work to a wider public, reveals the full extent of his gifts.
“André Kertész” is at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, until February 6th 2011 before moving to the Winterthur Fotomuseum, Zurich, from February 26th until May 15th, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, from June 11th until September 11th and the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, from September 30th until December 31st.
Article taken from The Economist.
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