André Kertész

(HUNGARIAN, 1894 - 1985)

André Kertész is one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned more than seventy years, he made some of the most deceptively simple yet compelling photographs ever created. Working intuitively, he sought to capture the poetry of modern urban life, revealing its quiet incidents and odd, occasionally comic, even bizarre juxtapositions. Combining an amateur’s love for the personal and immediate with a modernist’s sense of form, he created a purely photographic idiom that celebrated a direct observation of everyday life. A major retrospective of his work is traveling this year from the National Portrait Gallery to the Los Angeles County Museum and on to the International Center of Photography.