In connection with the series of exhibitions, the Hungarian National Museum presents the different periods of the work of photographer André Kertész, who was born 130 years ago, in three new volumes.
In the book The Trick of Forgetting, the reader will learn that in André Kertész’s late Polaroids, he turns his own apartment into a studio, where books, photos, objects and the perspectives offered by the window provide the raw material with which he begins to work. He often uses the contrast of light and shadow, he likes to take his previous recordings and compose a new context around them, reinterpreting each piece of his past. The polaroid images in his album From My Window, dedicated to his dead wife, are the results of years of grief work.
The volumes can be purchased in the shop of the National Museum.
The exhibition Gardener/Copies is on view at the National Museum until September 22, and the exhibition The Trick of Forgetting is on view at the Robert Capa Center until September 1.
On the occasion of the 130th anniversary of the birth of the world-famous photographer André Kertész, the Hungarian National Museum is organizing a series of exhibitions at three locations this year, which will present previously unseen photos and photographic rarities selected from the Kertész pictures purchased in 2021 from New York – recalls the museum’s announcement on Friday.
In connection with the exhibition series, three volumes were published by the Museum: André Kertész in Esztergom, The Breathing Archive – André Kertész’s War Diary and Letters, something entitled The Ploy of Forgetting. The author of the volumes is Éva Fisli, the curator of the exhibitions.
The publication André Kertész in Esztergom revolves around the question of whether it is possible to understand an artist who lived to be 91 years old and was still active in his last years through his early photographs and a few fragmentary diary entries.
The volume was prepared for the first stop of the exhibition, the exhibition of the same name presented at the MNM Balassa Bálint Museum in Esztergom, and offers a selection of vintage copies made by the young André Kertész in and around Esztergom.
The Breathing Archive is the first joint release of the documents kept in the Kertész estate in France and the vintage photos purchased in 2021 from New York. Photographs and texts from the First World War bring the reader closer to the photographer known worldwide today as André Kertész. When reading the diary, it is clear how the attention of the sensitive and aloof young man gradually opens up to the world. He makes friends, visits beautiful and terrible landscapes, faces death as a typhus patient, on the front and as a wounded person.
Although in his reminiscences in his old age, Kertész saw himself as a conscious, even born photographer, who knew from the beginning that he would be involved in photography, in the light of contemporary sources, it seems that the camera was primarily used to create relationships at first, and only gradually became a tool of self-expression in his hands.