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

In the volume The Real Ady Bölöni refers to the fact that many of his notes were lost, his library was ransacked and his written recollections were scattered after the revolutions, but his collected papers relating to Ady survived. Besides his own recollections, he must have based the references to Ady’s years in Paris on his correspondence with his wife and Itóka’s notes in her diary. He noted phases of activities and scenes relating to locations of Ady’s visits, sojourns and walks. For example: “His hotel was far from Léda and her husband’s apartment, which presented some independence for him. He liked the freedom of the night especially, because he daily walked through Paris at night from Rue de Lévis to the Quartier Latin, and could wander where his fancy and curiosity took him. And he did not miss the opportunities presenting themselves.’’32

Besides locations, the pictures also indicate Ady’s habits. For example, the poet would not move from his hotel bed until around noon: “Buried in Hungarian and French papers I find him still in bed. There is his bible bound in black and his morning drink, a pint of cold beer, on the bedside table. When he arrived and unpacked his things from his trunk, he placed the bible on the bedside table.”33

The author rightly says that what he shows in his book is not entirely identical with the conditions twenty years before. “Now that my friend Kertész, this really great artist and I took the photographs for my book, we visited the places where Ady had been many times. Even the trace of many had been obliterated by the time I came to Paris after the war. But his hotel stands intact in the Quartier Latin, where he stayed for months. Ady’s small Medicis coffee house turned into an Italian restaurant near the Luxembourg Gardens, but the magnificent garden with its plane trees is alive. The food factory also keeps letting out the scent of its roast meat, the renovated Café Cluny welcomes poets and the life on Rue de Lévis up beyond the Boulevard Villiers has hardly changed. Perhaps it has turned more colourful and even noisier around the building where Léda lived, and we even saw a small group of goats amidst the bustle of market sellers at the corner of the street.”34

Bölöni’s detailed requests and instructions presumably tied Kertész’s hand (in terms of compositions) and he sometimes was obliged to illustrate the text the author put in front of him.35 In our opinion, of the series in the genres of reportage, life and illustration, the arranged photo of the poet’s coffee house table taken from above, a lonely man walking slowly between the strips of shadow cast by the fence of the Luxembourg Gardens, the perspectival image of the

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