“The great democrat of modern photography” – a conversation with Patricia Albers, author of the latest Kertész biography

Many Hungarian artists of that generation, including Brassaï, Moholy-Nagy, and Kertész, were shaped by the post-Monarchy cultural atmosphere. Do you think this was an important aspect of Kertész’s life, how he experienced the collapse of the monarchy and its cultural impact?

The art historian Éva Forgács describes the post-monarchy as a time of “past-bound melancholy and nostalgia.” The old world had vanished, and life felt bleaker. For Kertész, it coincided with his return to a tedious job. Even though he hated the war, it allowed him to travel and meet and photograph all kinds of people and places, as he’d long dreamed of doing.

After the war Kertész got involved with a group of artists who shared the wider cultural attitude that Hungarian authenticity was rooted in the countryside. That gave him permission to photograph pastoral scenes and vignettes of family life and indulge his romantic instincts, romantic in the sense of concerned with self-expression. There was certainly an element of nostalgia. But also he was inspired to experiment, with cropping and enlargement, for instance.

These postwar years were hugely frustrating for him. He was stuck in that tedious job. He couldn’t figure out a satisfying way to make a living. So many doors had closed for a young Jewish man in the Hungary of the anti-Semite Miklós Horthy. All Kertész really wanted to do was to photograph anyway, and to photograph as he chose to, not in ways that would have brought in a steady income.

So it was an important period for Kertész but one that went on too long. By the time he arrived in Paris, he had exhausted his possibilities in Hungary. He had an intense pent-up desire for new and different experiences, and that paid off.

How did Kertész’s relationships with other Hungarian émigré photographers, like Brassaï, Rogi André, and Moholy-Nagy, influence his work?

We tend to think of creative people as lone individuals striving to express themselves and get their work into the world. Kertész presented himself that way, saying that no one had ever influenced him, that he was an intuitive. It’s true that in the 1920s Kertész pioneered certain ways of working. As Brassaï said, he was the first to appreciate the seductively photographic strangeness. He also adopted the Leica before almost any other serious photographer. As Cartier-Bresson said on behalf of the photography world after Kertész died: We are all his children. At the same time, Kertész talked about 1920s Montparnasse, photographers and artists, as one big family that shared artistic ideas, and that’s true too. For instance, I see Kertész’s 1934 book Paris Vu Par André Kertész as partly a response to Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit.

Looking at your question from another angle: other Hungarians, photographers and not, helped Kertész make the connections, find the jobs, and handle the practicalities that allowed him to be the bohemian photographer. He had no gift for foreign languages, so he relied heavily on other Hungarians during his early years in Paris. At that point, Brassaï was a collaborator and companion. Tihanyi explained things, introduced him around, acted as an informal agent, and apparently facilitated the exhibition at Au Sacre du Printemps that launched Kertész’s career in the picture press. Rogi André put aside her own art as a painter to work with him and handle practical matters. Like Tihanyi, she helped create the conditions that allowed him to flourish.

Granted, he taught her photography, and I do want to add that Kertész gave back. He also taught the Hungarian artist Tivadar Fried, and that skill may have saved Fried’s life during the war. And he did so much for Robert Capa, from teaching him skills like how to use a flash to getting him jobs to doing the layouts for two of his books to feeding him and giving him a place to sleep when he was broke.

After spending so many years studying Kertész, what aspect of his life do you find most interesting?

His wonderful photographs! The more I looked at and worked with them, the more I saw. I won’t begin to give examples because there are so many, including many that I couldn’t discuss in the book for lack of room. And others that I keep discovering.
I’ll say too that learning about Kertész’s life made many photographs feel more richly expressive. As one small example, I found out how attentive he was to the meanings of various flowers. He associated daisies with Elizabeth. That makes photographs of daisies like Chez Moi from 1973, with its feeling of cozy domesticity, and Flowers for Elizabeth from 1977, taken when Elizabeth was dying, feel all the more poignant.

Kertész lived a long life and faced many struggles. What do you think drove him, and how difficult was it to write about him as a person, a human being who may have had many flaws?

For one thing, I think he internalized the values of both his father, on one hand, and his mother, guardian uncle, and older brother, on the other, and that he struggled between them.

By all evidence, his father had a romantic temperament. He was more interested in reading than in building a solid and lucrative career. Kertész’s resolve to do what he wanted to do, however impractical, follows in his father’s footsteps. One friend of his told me there was “a “determined helplessness” about him. He just didn’t want to deal with the “ugliness” of business dealings.

At the same time, he felt compelled to be successful in conventional terms. He wanted fortune and fame. He fretted about being a failure, and, for decades, he did consider himself a failure. He often spoke harshly about well-known colleagues.

I see this conflict as tied to his emotional neediness and evasiveness about his own life. He often presented himself as more hero or more victim than he really was. It was hard to write about that aspect of his life. He was also a kind and generous man, and I wanted to interpret his words and actions fairly.

Kertész was a Hungarian Jew and an immigrant in France and the United States. He also had a very complex relationship with America. Do you think his identity as a Jew and an immigrant influenced his artistic development during his French and American periods?

Kertész’s time in France coincided with the heyday of the so-called School of Paris, which included many Jewish artists from Central Europe. He was close to Lajos Tihanyi, Gyula Zilzer, and Frederic Littman. He also knew Moïse Kisling, Ernő Goldfinger, Marc Chagall, Tristan Tzara, and others. As a Jew and an immigrant, he got paid work and emotional support from their loose network of mutual aid. In addition, some of his biggest and best paying clients were publications run by German Jews like Kurt Tucholsky and the Ullstein family and the Hungarian Jew Stefan Lorant. Everything changed after Hitler came to power, Kertész lost his lucrative German market, and the European photographic world roiled.
All that eventually caused Kertész to leave for New York, which of course has a large and vibrant Jewish community. But he couldn’t adjust to New York. He found relationships all transactional. He felt crushed by the consumerism and competition. He didn’t take full advantage of his relationships within the Jewish community as he did in Europe.