Montparnasse

A man in a harness is pulling a heavily loaded cart. He is crossing a street, his eyes focused over his shoulder on a car approaching in the distance. The load cannot be seen, with the exception of one sculpture of a standing, contemplative figure, at the front of the cart and in the center of the picture. The situation is entirely conceivable and almost commonplace, yet there is something slightly absurd about it. It is one of the typical ‘small events’ captured by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész in his Paris years (1925–1936). In 1928, he started photographing with the Leica, the revolutionary 35-mm camera that enabled lightning-fast reactions. Kertész’s eye for composition and his surrealist sense of beauty had already made him a popular freelance photojournalist for new magazines such as Vu and Die Berliner Illustrierte. In 1936, his reputation brought him a job in New York, where he was forced to remain during the war, becoming immersed in commercial work. It was not until after 1960 that he found his poetic eye once again in pictures that he took from his apartment in Washington Square.