Andor Kertész was born on 2 July 1894 in Budapest to the middle-class Jewish family of Lipót Kertész, a bookseller, and his wife, Ernesztin Hoffmann. Andor, known as "Bandi" to his friends, was the middle child of three sons, including Imre and Jenő. When Lipót died in 1908 from tuberculosis, the widowed Ernesztin was without a source of income to support their three children. Ernesztin's brother, Lipót Hoffmann, provided for the family and acted much like a father to the boys. The family soon moved to Hoffman's country property in Szigetbecse. Kertész grew up in a leisurely pace of life and pastoral setting that would shape his later career path.
After earning enough money, Kertész quickly bought his first camera (an ICA box camera) in 1912, despite his family's protests to continue his career in Business. In his free time, he photographed the local peasants, gypsies, and landscape of the surrounding Hungarian Plains (the puszta). His first photograph is believed to be Sleeping Boy, Budapest, 1912. His photographs were first published in 1917 in the magazine Érdekes Újság, during World War I, while Kertész was serving in the Austro-Hungarian army. As early as 1914 (for Example, Eugene, 1914), his distinctive and mature style was already evident.
In 1914, at the age of 20, he was sent to the frontline, where he took photographs of life in the trenches with a lightweight camera (a Goerz Tenax). Most of these photographs were destroyed during the violence of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919. Wounded in 1915 by a bullet, Kertész suffered temporary paralysis of his left arm.
He was sent for convalescence to a military hospital in Budapest, but was later transferred to Esztergom, where he continued to take photographs. These included a self-portrait for a competition in the magazine Borsszem Jankó. His most famous piece of this period was Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, 1917, the only surviving work of a series of a Swimmer whose image is distorted by the water. Kertész explored the subject more thoroughly in his series of "Distortions" photographs during the early 1930s.
Kertész did not heal soon enough to return to combat, and with peace in 1918, he returned to the stock exchange. There he met his Future wife Erzsebet Salomon (later changed to Elizabeth Saly), who also worked at the exchange. He began to pursue her romantically. During this period of work and throughout his whole career, he used Elizabeth as a model for his photographs. Kertész also took numerous photographs of his brother Jenő. Kertész left his career at the exchange to try agricultural work and beekeeping during the early 1920s. This venture was brief given the political turmoil that accompanied the revolution and coming of communism.
In the late 1920s, Kertész secretly married a French portrait Photographer by the name of Rosza Klein (she used the name Rogi André). The marriage was short-lived and he never spoke about it.
Kertész emigrated to Paris in September 1925, leaving behind his mother, his unofficial fiancée Elizabeth, both brothers, and his uncle Hoffman, who died shortly afterward. Jenő later emigrated to Argentina. Elizabeth Kertész remained until her Future husband was well enough established in Paris that they could marry. Kertész was among numerous Hungarian artists who emigrated during these decades, including François Kollar, Robert Capa, Emeric Fehér, Brassaï, and Julia Bathory. Man Ray, Germaine Krull and Lucien Aigner also emigrated to Paris during this period.
Initially Kertész took on commissioned work for several European magazines, gaining publication of his work in Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain. Soon after arriving in Paris, Kertész changed his first name to André, which he kept for the rest of his life. In Paris he found critical and commercial success. In 1927 Kertész was the first Photographer to have a one-man exhibition; Jan Slivinsky presented 30 of his photographs at the "Sacre du Printemps Gallery". Kertész had become connected with members of the growing Dada movement. Paul Dermée dubbed him "Brother Seer" and "Brother Seeing Eye" during his first solo exhibit, alluding to a medieval monastery where all the monks were blind bar one. Over the next years, Kertész was featured in both solo exhibits and group shows. In 1932 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, the price of Kertész's proofs was set at US$20 ($ 359 in 2018), a large sum of money during the Great Depression.
Kertész and other Hungarian artists formed a synergistic circle; he was featured in exhibits with some of them later in his life. Visiting his Sculptor friends, he was fascinated by the Cubism movement. He created photo portraits of Painters Piet Mondrian and Marc Chagall, the Writer Colette, and film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. In 1928, Kertész switched from using plate-glass cameras to a Leica. This period of work was one of his most productive; he was photographing daily, with work divided between magazine commissions through the late 1920s and his personal pieces. In 1930, at the Exposition Coloniale in Paris, Kertész was awarded a silver medal for services to photography.
Although Kertész rarely received bad reviews, it was the lack of commentary that lead to the Photographer feeling distant from recognition. Now, however, he is often considered to be the father of photojournalism. Even other Photographers cite Kertész and his photographs as being inspirational; Henri Cartier-Bresson once said of him in the early 1930s, "We all owe him a great deal." When he was 90 years old, a person asked him why he was still taking photographs. He replied, "I'm still hungry."
In 1930, he ventured back to Hungary to visit his family. After his return to Paris, Elizabeth followed him in 1931, despite opposition by her family. Elizabeth and André remained together for the rest of their lives. Despite his mother's dying in early 1933, Kertész married Elizabeth on 17 June 1933. He was said to have spent less time with his Artist friends in favor of his new wife.
The couple arrived in New York on 15 October 1936, with Kertész intent on finding fame in America. They lived at the Beaux Arts Hotel in Greenwich Village. Kertész found life in America more difficult than he had imagined, beginning a period which he later referred to as the "absolute tragedy". Deprived of his Artist friends, he also found that Americans rejected having their photos taken on the street. Soon after his arrival, Kertész approached Beaumont Newhall, Director of the photographic department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), who was preparing a show entitled Photography 1839–1937. Offering Newhall some of his Distortions photographs, Kertész bristled at his criticism, but Newhall did exhibit the photographs. In December 1937 Kertész had his first solo show in New York at the PM Gallery.
Frustrated, Kertész left Keystone after Prince left the company in 1937. He was commissioned by Harper's Bazaar for an article on the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in their April 1937 issue. The magazine continued to use him in further issues, and he also took commissions from Town and Country to supplement his income. Vogue invited the Photographer to work for the magazine, but he declined, believing it was not appropriate work for him. He chose to work for Life magazine, starting with a piece called The Tugboat. Despite orders, he photographed more than just tugboats, including works on the entire harbor and its activities. Life refused to publish the unauthorized photographs. Kertész resented the constraints on his curiosity.
On 25 October 1938, Look printed a series of Kertész photographs, entitled A Fireman Goes to School; but credited them mistakenly to Ernie Prince, his former boss. Infuriated, Kertész considered never working with photo magazines again. His work was published in the magazine Coronet in 1937, but in 1939 he was excluded when the magazine published a special issue featuring its "Most memorable photographs". He later severed all ties to the magazine and its Editor Arnold Gingrich. After being excluded from the June 1941 issue of Vogue, dedicated to photography, Kertész broke off relations with them. He had contributed to more than 30 commissioned photo essays and articles in both Vogue and House and Garden, but was omitted from the list of featured Photographers.
In 1941, the Kertész couple were designated as enemy aliens because of World War II (Hungary was fighting on the side of the Axis powers). Kertész was not permitted to photograph outdoors or to have any project related to national security. Trying to avoid trouble because Elizabeth had started a cosmetics company (Cosmia Laboratories), Kertész ceased to do commissioned work and essentially disappeared from the photographic world for three years.
On 20 January 1944, Elizabeth became a US citizen; and Kertész was naturalized on 3 February. Despite competition from Photographers such as Irving Penn, Kertész regained commissioned work. He was omitted from the list of 63 Photographers which Vogue's identified as significant in its "photographic genealogical tree". But, House and Garden commissioned him to do photographs for a Christmas issue. In addition, in June 1944 László Moholy-Nagy, Director of the New Bauhaus - American School of Design offered him a position teaching photography. Despite the honor, he turned the offer down.
Kertész worked in the settings of many famous homes and notable places, as well as overseas, where he traveled again in England, Budapest and Paris, renewing friendships and making new ones. During the 1945–62 period at House and Garden, the magazine published more than 3,000 of his photographs, and he created a high reputation in the industry. With little time for his personal work, Kertész felt starved of being able to exercise more artistic creativity.
In 1946, Kertész had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring photographs from his Day of Paris series. Kertész said this was one of his greatest times in the United States. In 1952, he and his wife moved to a 12th-floor apartment near Washington Square Park, the setting for some of his best photographs since having immigrated to the US. Using a telephoto lens, he took a series of snow-covered Washington Square, showing numerous silhouettes and tracks. In 1955 he was insulted to have his work excluded when Edward Steichen's The Family of Man show was featured at MoMA. Despite the success of the Chicago show, Kertész did not gain another exhibit until 1962, when his photographs were shown at Long Island University.
Toward the end of 1961, Kertész broke his contract to Condé Nast Publishing after a minor dispute, and started doing his own work again. This later period of his life is often referred to as the "International period", when he gained worldwide recognition and his photos were exhibited in many countries. In 1962 his work was exhibited in Venice; in 1963, he was one of the invited artists of the IV Mostra Biennale Internazionale della Fotografia there and he was awarded a gold medal for his dedication to the photographic industry. Later in 1963, his work was shown in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. He later visited Argentina to see his younger brother Jenő for the first time in years. Kertész experimented with color photographs, but only produced a few.
In 1964, soon after John Szarkowski became the photography Director at the Museum of Modern Art, he featured Kertész in a solo show. With his work critically acclaimed, Kertész gained recognition in the photographic world as an important Artist. The work of Kertész was featured in numerous exhibitions throughout the world in his later life, even into his early nineties. Due to his newfound success, in 1965 Kertész was appointed as a member of the American Society of Media Photographers.
Despite his successes, Kertész still felt unrecognised as a Photographer. His last years were spent travelling to various locations around the globe for his exhibitions, especially Japan, and rekindling friendships with other artists. To deal with the loss of his wife in 1977, Kertész fell back on his new network of friends, often visiting them to talk. By this time, he was said to have learned basic English and talked in what his friends called "Kertészian", a mixture of Hungarian, English and French.
In 1979, the Polaroid Corporation gave him one of their new SX-70 cameras, which he experimented with into the 1980s. Still growing in fame, Kertész was granted the National Grand Prize of Photography in Paris in 1982, as well as the 21st Annual George Washington Award from the American Hungarian Foundation the same year.
Throughout most of his career Kertész was depicted as the "unknown soldier" who worked behind the scenes of photography, yet was rarely cited for his work, even into his death in the 1980s. Kertész thought himself unrecognised throughout his life, despite spending his life in the eternal search for acceptance and fame. Though Kertész received numerous awards for photography, he never felt both his style and work was accepted by critics and art audiences alike. Although, in 1927, he was the first Photographer to have a solo exhibition, Kertész said that it was not until his 1946 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, that he first felt he received positive reviews on his work, and often cites this show as one of his finest moments in America. During his stay in America, he was cited as being an intimate Artist, bringing the viewer into his work, even when the picture was that of subjects such as the intimidating New York City and even his reproduced work printed after his death received good reviews; "Kertész was above all a consistently fine photographer". Kertész's work itself is often described as predominantly utilising light and even Kertész himself said that "I write with light". He was never considered to "comment" on his subjects, but rather capture them – this is often cited as why his work is often overlooked; he stuck to no political agenda and offered no deeper thought to his photographs other than the simplicity of life. With his art's intimate feeling and nostalgic tone, Kertész's images alluded to a sense of timelessness which was inevitably only recognised after his death. Unlike other Photographers, Kertész's work gave an insight into his life, showing a chronological order of where he spent his time; for Example, many of his French photographs were from cafés where he spent the majority of his time waiting for artistic inspiration.
Kertész died peacefully in his sleep at home on 28 September 1985; he was cremated and his ashes were interred with those of his wife.
