“Everything that surrounds you can give you something. Last summer I stayed in my room most of the time and I began playing around with things. Years ago I was given a primitive Polaroid camera and I didn’t like it -it was for snapshots. But one day I took it out. I had discovered, in the window of a shop, a little glass bust and I was very moved because it resembled my wife-the shoulder, and the neck were Elizabeth. For months and months, I looked at the bust in the window and finally I bought it. The lady in the shop said “It’s a beautiful bust sir” “I know” I said and I took it home, put it in my window, and began shooting and shooting with the Polaroid camera-in the morning, in the afternoon, in different lights something came out of this little incident, this little object. They made a book of all the pictures I took. It is dedicated to my wife. Look how the face of the bust is always changing: a shadow, which is the shadow of the curtain, then a passing cloud.The sky and its reflection give it the expression.I didn’t arrange this thing-it was there.Photography cannot make nature more beautiful. Nature is the most beautiful thing in the world. You can show the beauty, illustrate it, but it is never the real beauty-very far from it. We don’t know how beautiful nature really is.We can only guess.I am always saying that the best photographs are those I never took”
~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)
“What ever we have done, Kertész did it first.”
~Henri Cartier Bresson
(1908-2004)
Another visual love poem to his late wife Elizabeth. Simple and heart felt from a master in his last years. To get a sense of the artistry and magic of this man please watch this insightful video “Kertész in Paris” made a couple of years before he passed away.
