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

were present.15 A large part of the photographs on display were portraits of personalities Kertész had met in the period of one and a half years in Paris: Tristan Tzara, Paul Dermée, Mihály Károlyi, Gyula Zilzer, Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian, Enrico Prampolini, and others.

“Besides portraits and two earlier photographs taken in Budafok in 1919, Kertész exhibited pictures which were regarded as unusual at the time. They included the chairs in the Luxembourg Gardens, the Eiffel Tower shrouded in fog, telephone wires, Parisian rooftops and chimneys, a few images taken at night, still lifes, Mondrian’s pipe and his studio. Today it is already clear that these images were precursors of a 'new spirit’ and novel photography, as well as those of Kertész’s specifically developing oeuvre. At the opening evening the later surrealist Paul Dermée read his poem Frére voyant about Kertész. At that time in the spring of 1927 this poem seemed to have expressed a kind of artistic credo of Kertész.”16

KERTÉSZ

his child’s eyes see each thing for the first time; they see a great king naked when he is dressed in lies; they are frightened by the canvas-shrouded phantoms who haunt the banks of the Seine;

innocently they delight in new pictures made by three sunlit chairs in the Luxembourg Gardens,

Mondrian’s door opening onto a staircase,

Eyeglasses tossed near a pipe on a table.

there is no method, no arrangement, no deception, no embroidery.

your style is as true as your vision.

in this asylum for the blind, Kertész sees for us.17

(translated by Jill Anson)17

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