E. Csorba Csilla: A kamera poétája. Adré Kertész-fotó a Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum gyűjteményeiből (Budapest, 2019)
E. Csorba Csilla: A kamera poétája. André Kertész fotói a Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum gyűjteményeiben / Csilla E. Csorba: The Poet of the Camera Photographs by André Kertész in the Collections of the Petőfi Literary Museum
sketches and unfinished works. The Kertész photographs in the collections of the Petőfi Literary Museum are not all works of an artistic standard, but visual documents acquired from various literary and theatre historical bequests or by chance, but some of them represent artistic quality. Seventy-two photographs in the catalogue were acquired by public collections via their inheritors of Endre Bajomi Lázár,2 Géza Blattner, György Bölöni, Lajos Hatvány, Lajos Kassák, Mária Mirkovszky and Lajos Tihanyi. When we decided to exhibit all the photographs from the collections of PIM, we adopted the principle that Kertész himself articulated on several occasions when he compared his creative method to writing a diary: "... the camera for me has been a document; that is how I've shown the way I lived. My photographic activity has actually been a visual diary.”3 Both significant and insignificant, small and large scale events appear in these images, just like in a journal. In the past one and a half decades an increasing number of studies were written which devoted more emphasis to his early years, his starting career, to Hungarian roots and connections of André Kertész. The exhibition held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in 2005 and the accompanying album discussed Kertész's oeuvre in a new light. It divided the photographer’s career into four parts: the periods in Hungary (1894-1925) and Paris (1925-1936), the years he spent in New York (1936-1961) and finally the era of international recognition (1962-1985). The emphases of the introduction make it clear that the 31-year-old-Kertész (without any preliminary training) arrived in Paris with a resolute, individual way of seeing and it was not so much contemporary international photography but the knowledge of Hungarian artists - for example, the painter István Szőnyi and his circle - which played a significant role.4 Károly Kineses and Magdolna Kolta published their volume Hazai anyag. Fotónapló. Kertész és a magyarok (Home Material, Photo Diary, Kertész and the Hungarians) also in 2005. To the question why it was important to assemble those photographs and data they responded: “it is not enough to know something, you must know everything about him - when and where he happened to be, what he regarded important to photograph, in what way he renewed himself and in what he was always true to himself.”5 Adopting these principles, we intend to contribute to mapping Kertész’s Hungarian contact network and exploring his oeuvre in any form relating to Hungary with the help of the collections of PIM. 21
