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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
KERTESZ
ANDRE
Chapter 17 (part I)
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1928
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Andre Kertesz
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Meudon
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The Poetry of the
Street
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He always saw himself
as a realist and documentary photographer. But during his time in Paris,
the Hungarian-born Andre Kertesz had in fact matured into artistic
greatness. Just how strongly he was also influenced by the Cubist and
Surrealist developments of his age is clear in Meudon, taken in 1928.
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At least in titling his
photographs, the great poet among twentieth-century photographers was
fairly prosaic: the names of what are today probably his best known works
- Chez Mondrian, Danseuse satirique, and Fourchette — merely designate
what is to be seen in the photograph. And also in christening this
photograph Meudon, Kertesz was referring to an actual place, a suburb to
the southwest of Paris, approximately halfway to Versailles. Just when in
1928 the picture was taken we do not know, but from the leafless tree in
the background, it must have been either at the beginning or end of the
year, even though the photograph wasn't published until 1945, a good
decade and a half after Kertesz took it. The New York publishing house of
J. J. Augustin brought out Day of Paris, edited by George Davis and
designed by Alexey Brodovitch, in a 9 1/2 x 7-inch format, with 148 pages
containing 102 illustrations - in what was a halfway decently printed
volume, even though it was quite modest by today's standards.
Nevertheless, for Andre Kertesz, the publication was an important event,
not so much because the design of the book had been taken over by the man
who was probably the most important art director of the day, but because
Kertesz's collection of Paris shots taken between 1925 and 1936 formed a
reminiscence of what he always referred to later as artistically the most
fruitful and most beautiful period of his life. Moreover, the publication
constituted a piece of publicity during a phase that otherwise must
undoubtedly be regarded as the low point of his career.
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Kertesz
Andre
( 1894-1985)
Meudon, Paris
1928
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Kertesz
Andre
( 1894-1985)
Meudon, Paris
1928
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The greater part of his
pictorial archive in his bags
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Andre Kertesz emigrated from Paris
to New York in 1936, lured by an offer of the Keystone Agency - although
it is possible that the photographer, scion of a Jewish Hungarian family,
was also motivated by political developments in Europe. In his baggage,
Kertesz had carried along the greater part of his pictorial archive - a
fact which suggests that he had determined to spend a longer time in the
USA. This material was to form the basis of Day of Paris more than a
decade later. The rest of the story is well-known - an almost immediate
fall-out with Keystone; the artist's more-or-!ess unsuccessful attempts at
finding work with all the various publishers and presses; his
classification as an unfriendly foreigner in 1941, resulting in a ban on
publication of his work; his jobbing after the war in magazine
photography. Looking back, Kertesz always designated his move to the USA
as a mistake, and his work for magazines such as House and Garden and
Vogue as a waste of time. Why he therefore remained in the USA remains a
riddle; what is certain is that the artist, who had been active on
numerous projects between the wars in Europe, could not gain recognition
in the USA for his work, steeped as it was in the formal language of
Surrealism. In an often-told story of his failure to acquire a foothold In
Life, which had been founded in the year of his arrival in America, it is
said that the editors told him that his pictures told too much: a highly
telling comment when it comes to our picture.
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Contradictions that create both
the visual interest and the oddity of the image
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The publication of the monograph
in 1945, the year that the war ended, must therefore have seemed to
Kertesz to be a priceless recompense, all the more so because it also made
amends for an even earlier blow. The title of the book, Day of Paris, may
have seemed to many like a counterpart to BrassaT's warmly received Paris
de Nuit of 1933, but in fact the publisher had originally offered the
theme to Kertesz. In view of the meager stipend, however, Kertesz refused
the commission, thus opening the door for his somewhat younger Hungarian
colleague. No less a figure than Paul Morand had composed the foreword to
BrassaT's first published work. Day of Paris, by contrast, was served with
extended captions, supposedly written by the editor George Davis. Meudon
appears as a full-page plate on page 83. "The sharp unreality of
stage-sets. Like a toy an engine crosses the viaduct in a suburb," reads
the caption -which indicates that the image had already irritated and
alienated its contemporaries.
A train, coming from the right, is
crossing a viaduct, In the foreground, as if accidentally, a man in a dark
coat wearing a hat is crossing the street, while further behind, nine
figures, two of them children, are heading off in various directions.
Nothing in the picture is unusual in itself: there is no 'event' here, no
'transgression' of borders in the sense of the artistic theory promulgated
by Structuralism. And yet the effect of the vertical black-and-white
photograph is somehow disturbing. Does this feeling originate in a
simultaneity of dissimilar things, that captures the observer's gaze,
surprises them, leaves questions unanswered? Normally, photography
presents connections, reveals causalities, reveals insights. But this
picture explains nothing; it seems to be torn from some kind of unknown
context. And on top of this, it is loaded with an entire series of clearly
obvious contradictions that constitute the visual interest, but also the
oddity, of the image. There is, for example, the massive viaduct and
equally imposing steam locomotive that appear as if in miniature in the
photograph, as if taken over from a model train set. And then there is the
well-groomed gentleman, whose dark coat together with his tie and Homburg
don't quite fit into the otherwise rather shabby surroundings. What is a
man like him, whom we would rather expect to find strolling on one of the
boulevards in the center of the city, doing out here in the suburb of
Meudon - and furthermore, 'caught' with a newspaper-wrapped object which
the 'suspect' seems to be transporting like booty from left to right
through the picture. Even though it depicts a scene clearly drawn from
everyday life in Paris, something surreal clings to the photograph,
something reminiscent of the paintings of de Chirico, or the inventions of
a Balthus or Rene Magritte, or of certain scenes in the films of Luis
Bunuel. More than anything else, the photograph resembles a still taken
from a film; the architecture, diminishing in size as the receding street
curves away to the left, and the viaduct in the deep background, lend the
picture a tangibly stage-like quality.
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Friends with the Avant-garde
circles of Montparnasse
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At the time he made the picture,
the Hungarian-born Kertesz, age thirty-four, was a well-known and
successful photographic artist in Paris. No less a figure than Julien Levy
would soon designate him as a "prolific leader in the new documentary
school of photography." Strictly speaking, Kertesz was a member ofthe
large Hungarian-Jewish Diaspora whose innovative work was making a major
contribution to the development of a new look to photography around 1930.
In this context one can name Robert Capa, Stefan Lorant, Martin Munkacsi,
as well as Brassai, born Gyula Halasz, who had moved to Paris in 1924.
Kertesz's first photographs date from 1914, and his journalistic
publications had already gained him a certain degree of fame in Hungary o
the early 1920s. Why he moved to Paris in 1925 we do not know; after all,
the majority of his photographic compatriots were drifting to Berlin, at
that time the uncontested center of a dynamically growing photographic
press. What is certain is that in Paris he soon found his way into the
artistic Avant-garde circles of Montparnasse. Although he seems to have
had only a loose connection with the reserved Man Ray, he was in regular
contact with more-or-less well-known Hungarian artists such as Lajos
Tihanyi, Josef Csaky, Istvan Beothy, and even BrassaT. Kertesz regularly
met his colleagues in the Cafe du Dome, which, located on the corner of
the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, soon became the center for the
informal group of artists.
In addition to achieving a
respectable measure of success in these years as a photojournalist,
especially for German and French papers, Kertesz still had enough time and
energy to pursue freelance projects directed toward developing his
personal photographic style - one which is more-over not to be defined
with any of the traditional vocabulary. According to Jean-Claude Lemagny,
his pictures "have something restrained, dampened, soft, about them."
Kertesz was perfectly aware of the artistic tendencies of his age,
especially Cubism and Surrealism, "but neither dominate his work; both
remain subservient to the actual photographic task at hand... Kertesz is
surrealistic only to the extent that reality itself is. With every step in
the real world, an abyss of poetry can open up."
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The ideal tool for the artist
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Meudon came into being at an
important moment in Kertesz's life, for this was the year in which he
purchased his first Leica. The small-format camera, which had been
available on the market since 1925, proved to be the ideal tool for the
artist. The 35-mm camera, at once handy and discrete, made Kertesz's
particular approach as a strolling photographer considerably easier. In
addition, the 36-exposure rolls allowed pictures to be taken in sequence,
thus allowing a visually more experimental approach to a valid pictorial
formula - an advantage which, as we shall see, played an important role
also in the conception of Meudon. Portraits of his artist friends;
including Mondrian, Foujita, and Chagall; interiors, as well as everyday
objects and street scenes, were among Kertesz's more common themes in
those early years in Paris. Nonetheless from the beginning, Kertesz's
visual exploration of the metropolis on the Seine occupied the center of
his artistic interest. In these years, according to Sandra S. Phillips, he
often strolled through areas like Montmartre and Meudon. Gaining
familiarity with the traditional artist-quarter of Montmartre was, of
course, a part ofthe required task of every new-comer to the Paris scene.
Meudon, in contrast, was not a place that a strolling photographer would
visit as a matter of course: one must inten-tionally board a streetcar to
get there. But what might have drawn Kertesz to Meudon in 1928?
At this point, the survival of a
total of three small-format negatives, distributed on two nitrate films,
becomes significant. One image is without people or train, and lacks both
date and frame number on the roll. Two more images, including the
published version, were taken one directly after the other. Which was the
first exposure? Presumably the scene without people or train, for it seems
unlikely that the visually experienced Kertesz would have followed the
dramatic composition of our picture with a comparatively boring variation
without human figures. In any case, the photographer made two visits to
Meudon. The diminishing wood pile and the alterations in the scaffolding
of a building indicate that a good deal of time must have elapsed between
the first shot and the two suc-ceeding ones. If Kertesz had traveled out
to Meudon for the sake of the viaduct, however imposing it might be, he
would undoubtedly have been satisfied with his first picture, in which the
bridge is clearly evident - or he would have immediately attempted another
shot. Consequently, there must have been another motive that drew Kertesz
to Meudon, where the critical picture was made almost in passing, as it
were. Kertesz's exhibition at the gallery Sacre du Printemps in 1927
undoubtedly marked an important station in the artist's professional
career. Not only was the show one of the first exhibitions emphasizing the
art of photography in general, but it also constituted the first large
summary of his work in progress, with which he hoped to establish
connections to better known photographers, in particular Man Ray. A group
photograph also dating from 1927 reveals just how much a part of the
international art circle in Paris Kertesz had already become. On the
picture titled After the soiree we see Piet Mondrian, Michel Seuphor,
Adolf Loos, Ida Thai, and in the background the German artist Willi
Baumeister who, in his own words, had met with "recognition and very great
interest on the part of the French artists" and even toyed for a time with
the idea of moving to France. At least on one other occasion Kertesz did a
portrait of Baumeister: in 1926 in Mondrian's studio together with Gertrud
Stemmler, Julius Herburger, Piet Mondrian, Michel Seuphor, and Margit
Baumeister. In other words, Kertesz and Baumeister had met at the latest
by 1926. Taking a closer look at the group portrait of 1926, there is an
astounding similarity between Baumeister and the gentleman in a dark coat,
whose shadowed face nonetheless emerges as powerful and broad - and who
likewise seems to be wearing glasses.
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Never rearranged a subject
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We know that Willi Baumeister
visited Paris in 1926,1927, and 1929, even if there is no direct evidence
for 1928. In a letter to Oskar Schlemmer dated 2 November 1928, now
privately owned, the German artist speaks of a certain "Miss whom I met in
Paris" - a statement that certainly does not constitute proof of a visit
to the city during the year in question, but which makes it nonetheless
more probable, If we assume that Willi Baumeister in fact was in the
French capital during the course of the year, what might have led him to
Meudon? A visit to his friend and fellow-painter Hans Arp, whose studio
was in fact located in Meudon at this timer Clearly, there is at least
some evidence to support the hypothesis that the photograph presents us
with the figure of the constructivist Willi Baumeister - whom Kertesz had
accompanied to Meudon and captured on film as he crossed the street. The
flat, newspaper-wrapped package also suggests the possibility of a
painter. But if the figure is in fact that of his friend Baumeister, why
then did Kertesz not identify him In the caption beneath the picture? The
explanation is simple: "The difference between Kertesz and Bourke-White,
as well as many others who did photographs on assignment to satisfy
editorial needs, is that she would sometimes rearrange a subject; Kertesz
never would," declared Weston Naef. But the idea of staging a scene would
certainly have occurred to Kertesz's 'teammate' Willi Baumeister, who
appears, moreover, as a complete figure in the uncropped photograph. The
possibility of staging is all the more realistic since Kertesz was
demonstrably working toward an ultimate composition for his picture - as
evidenced by the three 'stations' through which the photograph passed.
Moreover, a reference to Baumeister in the photograph would have led to an
inevitable hierarchizing of the elements in the picture. The balance among
viaduct, train, and man-with-hat would shift in the direction of the human
figure, and we would therefore understand the picture solely as a portrait
of Willi Baumeister - and a none too good one at that. Only insofar as the
photograph keeps its secret does it also retain its visual power and
surrealistically inspired poetry.
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Kertesz
Andre
(b Budapest, 2 July 1894; d New York, 27 Sept 1985).
American photographer of Hungarian birth. As a young man he used to wander
around Budapest and visit the Ethnographic Museum. At this time Bela Bartok
and Zoltan Kodaly were rediscovering Hungarian folk music, and Hungarian
poets and painters were looking at their ancient vernacular traditions for
inspiration. Kertesz, who started taking photographs at the age of 12, also
tried to reflect these interests, both in his choice of countryside subjects
and in the simplicity of his style. Self-taught, he often took his camera
with him when he went to visit relatives in the small peasant towns of the
Hungarian heartland, the puszta. He tried to go beyond mere recording
of holiday memories, or of the idyllic relationship of the country people to
nature; he rather sought out timeless and essential qualities in the
ordinary day-to-day events that he saw around him.
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The Tender Touch,
Bilinski
1915
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Displaced People
1916
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Underwater Swimmer
1917
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The Dancing Faun
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Cheese Racks, Paris
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Circus Performer
1920
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Wandering Violinist, Abony, Hungary
1921
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Feeding the Ducks in the Late Afternoon Tisza Szalka
1924
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Geza Blattner
1925
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Chez Mondrian
1926
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Satiric Dancer, Paris
1926
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Parc Des Sceaux in Fall
1926
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Magda Forstner
1926
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Self-portrait by Andre Kertesz
1927
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Montmartre
1927
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Hands and Books
1927
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Fork, Paris
1928
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Study of People and Shadows
1928
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May
1928
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Paul Arma's Hands
1928
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Broken plate
1929
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Chez Mondrian, Paris
1929
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Vert Galant On A Wintery Day, Paris
1929
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Colette with Flowers
1930
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Shadows
1931
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"Fete Foraine", Paris
1931
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Elizabeth and I in a cafe in Montparnasse
1931
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Elizabeth
1931
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Rue des Ursins
1931
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Clock of the Academie Francaise
1932
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