Getty Museum
Distortion, Paris
Creator
André KertészAmerican Photographer · 1894–1985
All works by this person →> [T]he moment always dictates in my work....Everybody can look, but they don't necessarily see...I see a situation and I know that it's right. > > --André Kertész André Kertész bought his first camera and made his first photograph while working as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange in 1912. After years of amateur snapshot photography in his native Hungary, he moved to Paris in 1925 and began
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- negative March 1984; print later
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
- Object ID
- b84fb725-8500-4e61-a7e3-99cc252f4d2e
> The nature of womanhood began to preoccupy André Kertész in 1933 in a very different way than in his female portraits of 1927 ([85.XM.371.1](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55846/andre-kertesz-magda-forstner-paris-american-1926/), [86.XM.706.14](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55865/andre-kertesz-anna-marie-merkel-mme-repsz-paris-american-1926-1927/), [84.XM.193.56](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55789/andre-kertesz-mrs-hubbell-paris-american-1931/)): the early series presents perfectly costumed and coiffured women, while the 1933 series shows women in vulnerable and distorted states of undress. See also [84.XM.193.16](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55749/andre-kertesz-distortion-american-negative-1933-print-later/), [84.XM.193.18](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55751/andre-kertesz-distortion-number-40-paris-american-1933/), [85.XM.176.5](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55823/andre-kertesz-distortion-48-american-1933/), [85.XM..176.6](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55824/andre-kertesz-distortion-49-american-1933/), and [85.XM.176.7](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55825/andre-kertesz-distortion-number-150-paris-american-1933/). > > Kertész was hired in 1933 by the men's magazine *Le Sourire* to create a series of nude studies using parabolic mirrors to exaggerate and condense different parts of the picture. The images show a direct connection to Surrealist painting and literature. Picasso also created distorted transformations of the idealized female form during this period. > > Two other photographs in the Getty collection ([86.XM.706.33](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55884/andre-kertesz-nude-paris-american-about-1933/) and [2018.52.7](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/329553/andre-kertesz-distortion-20-american-negative-1933-print-later/)) make up part of a small group of surviving undistorted studies of Kertész's model for the series of approximately two hundred Distortions. > > Adapted from *André Kertész*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Weston Naef (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1994), 74. ©1994, J. Paul Getty Museum.
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