André Kertész

André Kertész’s poetic images of everyday life in Budapest, Paris, and New York evidence a modernist eye for abstraction. But his work was also autobiographical. This soft-focus portrait of Jean Ducrot, his Paris editor and publisher, ties Kertész to Pictorialist traditions (see Edward Steichen’s portrait of Matisse opposite wall), but Ducrot’s direct gaze at the camera is also distinctly modern, suggesting access to the sitter that only the camera could provide.