AndréKertész

André Kertész (1894–1985), born Andor Kertész in Budapest, took up photography as a largely self-taught practice while working as a stockbroker's clerk, photographing peasants, Roma communities and the Hungarian plains before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. In 1925, against his family's wishes, he moved to Paris, then the artistic capital of the world, where he worked for the pioneering illustrated magazine VU and mixed with the émigré and avant-garde circles associated with Dada and Surrealism.

His Paris years, roughly 1925 to 1936, produced some of his most celebrated work: intimate studies of artists' studios and daily street life, and the Distortions series of nudes photographed in fairground mirrors, alongside a body of photojournalism that helped define the modern photo essay. Kertész's unorthodox, intuitive angles and compositions set him apart from his contemporaries, though wider critical recognition would come only much later in his career.

Facing the rise of Nazism and antisemitic persecution, Kertész emigrated to the United States in 1936, where he had to rebuild his career largely through commercial and magazine commissions, working for outlets such as Vogue and House & Garden through the 1940s and into the 1950s. It was not until later in life, as he stepped back from commissioned work, that his earlier European photographs and his ongoing personal work received the international acclaim now attached to his name.

Kertész's career is conventionally divided into Hungarian, French, American and International periods, and he is today considered one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century photography, admired for a body of work that shaped the visual language of the photo essay and influenced photographers from Brassaï to Henri Cartier-Bresson. He died in New York in 1985.