Feb 7, 2008

André Kertész - First and Last




"The moment always dictates in my work. What I feel, I do. This is the most important thing for me. Everybody can look, but they don't necessarily see. I never calculate or consider; I see a situation and I know that it's right, even if I have to go back to get the proper lighting."
André Kertész



André Kertész - First and Last, an exhibition of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, brings together the rarely-seen early work from his native Hungary - the famed “Hungarian contacts” with a comprehensive survey of late, great Polaroid work, produced near the end of his life. This exhibition, drawn mostly from the archives of the Kertész Foundation, will be the first comprehensive presentation of many of the late Polaroids.

Southeast Museum of Photography
Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 11:00 - 5:00
Saturday, Sunday 1:00-5:00, closed on Monday

1200 W. International Speedway Blvd.
Daytona Beach, FL, 32114,
Phone: (386) 506 4475
Free Admission & Parking


André Kertész, The Polaroids

The exhibit coincides with the release of the monograph André Kertész, The Polaroids (W. W. Norton & Company).

"When his wife and cherished companion, Elizabeth, died in 1977, Kertész seemed a broken man. He was revived when a friend gave him a Polaroid Land camera, and he began to photograph a glass sculpture and other objects that reminded him of Elizabeth.

Working within the Polaroid's technical limitations and largely confined to his apartment, Kertész rediscovered and reaffirmed his original genius. He combined the glass sculpture with other objects in still lifes, as if they were translucent fragments of his broken heart. He posed the sculpture against his window on Washington Square. He photographed his own shadow and his pensive aging face. Pure modernist form and expressionist autobiography, the aesthetic of his prime years, are redeemed in an essay of old age." Philip E. Bischof, Orlando Sentinel

"After the death of his wife, André Kertész consoled himself by taking up a new camera, the Polaroid SX70. As with earlier equipment, he mastered the camera and produced a provocative body of work that both honored his wife and lifted him out of depression.

Here Kertész dips into his reserves one last time, tapping new people, ideas, and tools to generate a whole new body of work through which he transforms from a broken man into a youthful artist. Taken in his apartment just north of New York City’s Washington Square, many of these photographs were shot either from his window or in the windowsill. We see a fertile mind at work, combining personal objects into striking still lifes set against cityscape backgrounds, reflected and transformed in glass surfaces. Almost entirely unpublished work, these photographs are a testament to the genius of the photographer’s eye as manifested in the simple Polaroid." Robert Gurbo

Robert Gurbo is the curator of the André Kertész estate and the editor of The Early Year with photographs of the Hungarian artist and lives in New York City.

posted by Photography Collection at 3:46 AM

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