Distorted Nude #40, André Kertész

Archive Label 2003:
Self-taught, Kertész began taking photographs in Budapest when he was twelve years old. When the first world war erupted, he took his camera on military duties behind infantry lines, capturing images of soldiers in Poland and the ruins of villages inhabited by struggling survivors. In 1925, he moved to Paris, believing that city would prove a more lively cultural center for his art.

By the late 1920s, Kertész had refined an interesting technique of instantaneous picture- taking, which often juxtaposed several glimpses of everyday events. These gave an eerie sense of the tensions rampant in Europe at the close of the decade. He worked on a series of distorted nudes in the early 1930s, in which he deliberately transformed the human body into grotesque visions. The photographer found that the flood of artists pouring into France to escape Nazism created fierce competition for jobs, and so he jumped at the chance for an extended assignment in New York City in 1936. Once there, he stayed in the bustling metropolis to do freelance work long after the original job was complete, gaining resident citizenship along with an international reputation.

Archive Label:
Kertész distorted this nude female body by photographing it in a curved mirror, of the sort found in a circus fun-house.