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Lot Essay
Kertész's early work, Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary, 1917, a naturally distorted image of a man beneath the surface of the water can be regarded as a precursor to later work. In 1929, he produced a group of portraits of Carlo Rim, editor of Vu magazine, taken beside the fun house mirrors at Luna Park in Paris. In 1933, he was commissioned by Le Sourire, a French humor magazine to create a series of distorted female nudes.
Kertész posed two models in front of circus mirrors and produced some 200 glass plate negatives in a four week period. Twelve distortions were illustrated in the March 1933 issue of Le Sourire and in September of that year an article by Bertrand Guégan, "Kertész and His Mirror" was published in Arts et métiers graphiques.
Although Kertész never formally aligned himself with the Surrealists, the "found" nature of his Distortions, in which effects were achieved not by photographic manipulation, but by the actual reflective properties of the mirror, was revolutionary and influenced the experimental work of contemporaries such as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy.
Kertész posed two models in front of circus mirrors and produced some 200 glass plate negatives in a four week period. Twelve distortions were illustrated in the March 1933 issue of Le Sourire and in September of that year an article by Bertrand Guégan, "Kertész and His Mirror" was published in Arts et métiers graphiques.
Although Kertész never formally aligned himself with the Surrealists, the "found" nature of his Distortions, in which effects were achieved not by photographic manipulation, but by the actual reflective properties of the mirror, was revolutionary and influenced the experimental work of contemporaries such as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy.