André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
I never had to go very far for subjects—they were always on my doorstep. But I can’t analyze it. People ask me how I did it. I don’t know; the event dictated it.
My work is inspired by life. I express myself through my photographs. Everything that surrounds me provokes my feelings.
I do what I feel, that’s all, I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That’s all I’ve ever done.
Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d’être. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d’être, which lives on in itself.
You don’t see the things you photograph, you feel them.
This is a photograph of the apartment taken while my wife was in the hospital. I wanted the apartment to be painted for her when she came back, but she never came back.
(Photo caption)
My youth in Hungary is full of sweet and warm memories. I have kept the memory alive in my photographs. I am a sentimentalist—born that way, happy that way.
I always had a small camera with me on the front line, where I made candid, informal photographs, unlike the official photographers for the War Department. They always came with a huge camera on a tripod after the battle was over to make a scenic photograph that would show the destruction.
