Sold for €11,000
Estimate: € 9.000–11.000
Gelatin silver print, printed in the late 1950s, framed
19,7 x 24,6 cm
Signed, titled and dated by the photographer in pencil on the reverse
LITERATURE André Kertész. Sixty Years of Photography 1912-1972, London 1972, p. 75; Robert Delpire (ed.), André Kertész, Photo-Galerie Bd. 2, Munich 1978, p. 81.
Kertész began incorporating visual distortions into his images already at the start of his career. 1917’s Underwater Swimmer is the earliest example. In the early 1930s Kertész was invited by the magazine Le Sourire to produce nude photographs. He bought two distorting mirrors on the flee market and the editors provided him with a studio space and two models. Within only two-weeks, Kertész produced around 200 nude distortions on glass negatives. The photographer stretched and warped nude models — their floating, elongated shoulders, heads, and arms make the figures particularly surreal. Kertész used the mirrors to create a sense of unreality and to subvert an otherwise conventional genre by disorganizing and transforming it to something surreal and grotesque. Distortion #40, present as beautiful early contact print, was selected for the cover of Kertész’s first publication of this series in 1976. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976).
Start price: €4.500