LARTIGUE (France, 1894-1986),
KERTESZ (Hungary, 1894-1985)
Photography, because it records indicial imprints, which it obtains in a
widely involuntary manner, sometimes favours emptiness, that painting, as it
works from stroke to stroke according to a hand and a brain, is tempering, even
by the Chinese. However, as our brains detest emptiness, photographers at the
outset also have fled this opening, this gap. For the mobilising emptiness to
make its entrance, we had to wait until 1900, and for photography to be handled
by a child.
1. Physical emptiness: Lartigue
When an angel flies in Tintoretto’s paintings, it is because it flees
the ground. When an object feels as though it flies in Lartigue’s work it is
because an emptiness is borne from below or within. The photographic box is
miraculous in that sense. In some circumstances, it is enough to orientate it a
little ‘too’ low – hence to slightly lift up the motive to the top
– to obtain the desired effect, under the condition to use great bands of
white – or at least of brightnest – to elide the points of support,
and not to forget a few generous obtuse angles. Then, if they do not move, things
are in suspension, or in flight.
To this effect, the Belle Époque was not a fortuitous moment. To catch
the flight with wonder, one needed the surprise of seeing the first automobiles jolting in the clouds
of dust of badly paved roads, the first light airplanes flying a few meters above the
ground before landing, the first bicycles combining the independence of
movement and the unsteady balance… all this in a constant ‘sporting’
atmosphere. It is the era when painter Vuillard, who was then at his peak, would
sometimes leave a conversation to pick up a camera laid down on the corner of a
fireplace, turning it God knows where to press the trigger mechanism, and made
the trees and paths glide (FS, 121) before ending his sentence.
Obviously, this does not make up a photographic subject, even for
Vuillard. Some particular cerebral disposition was required to grasp the
emptiness and the skimming over for Lartigue to produce – aged just ten –
this historic self-portrait where we see him in his bath. His head is next to
the Saint Andrew’s cross of the wide helixes of his water sprayer, both in
suspension, skimming over, with the white band of the bath crossing the entire
middle plan whilst the water on the front of the shot steals the space from
below (*FS, 126). There is no prejudice of viewpoint here (no more privileged
reference system, as a physicistwould say around that time): my two little
racing cars roll on the floor, it does not matter, for I can place the camera
on the ground to photograph them. I will also cover the chimney with a white
sheet so as they are caught between land and air (FS, 125). Soon, Cousin
Bichonade will fly over a garden staircase (FF, 125), and the jumper will
remain suspended between window and ground (FS, 128), a lady, her two dogs and
a car that passes them surf on the Bois de Boulogne.
This photographic subject, established at the Belle Époque, will
continue in the Roaring Twenties. Not only in 1926’s Icaria jump of the young
Gérard over his fort, the beach, the sea, and the end of the world (FS, 235).
In 1929, just before the Depression, the Jumelles Rowe du Casino de Paris give us a preview into their
excellent Charleston (the first dance to say ‘damn’ to the ground) in the way
they ‘rise up’ above a car hood ensuring the great white emptiness of the
foreground and the famous obtuse angle (**PF, 140). In 1943 still, in Florette
à Annecy (PHPH, p. 54), the arms, horizontally spread out at mid-length, play the same role as the bath in the middle distance in 1904. It was a good thing that Lartigue did not
pass away before reaching 92 years of age.
2. The metaphysical emptiness: Kertész
Yet, there is emptiness and emptiness. Although he was born on the same
year, Kertész, who in turn exploits emptiness as a decompression, is a lot less
precocious because his intention is more demanding. Born in Hungary like Moholy-Nagy,
he also sees everything as a kind of network. However, his bars are principally
vertical, and to erect upright a lying body, he invents acrobatic poses (AP,
255) and even the anamorphosis he calls ‘distorsions’ (AP, 258). On the other
hand, what arises his interests in these grids is not the full but the
in-between, and more precisely the light that is caught and that feeds the
in-between as a Substance, in a sort of absolute space where there would no
longer be top or bottom, foreground or background. No longer the weightlessness
of the flight and the skimming over we find in Lartigue’s work, but that of
ubiquity.
This reminds us of something in painting. When Kertész arrives in Paris
in 1925, he soon meets Mondrian. The Dutchman’s – whom at first recorded
whirlwinds like those of his native plains – painting progressively
prepared the ground for this vertical and horizontal turbulence before creating
these compositions in rectangles that everyone knows. In the latter, we must
see that the original mobility – right up to 1943’s Victory
boogie-woogie (a
rather eloquent title) which was interrupted by his death – is never
lost. All in all, a 1926 Mondrian, at the time when Kertész photographs his
studio and sees a vertical network in weightlessness (AP, 248-9), is a certain rotation
whose speed is
simultaneously nil and infinite ; just like, between 1915 and 1918, a Malevich,
through modulated interval of the angles between the oblique parallelepiped, is
a translation
whose speed were both nil and infinite. Therefore, the Mondrianese colours
stick to their end of the spectrum, red and yellow on the one side, blue on the
other, since green – median – would have degraded this formidable
immobile animation by equalizing the difference of potential, the condition for
useful energy. Thus, the theosophical painter pursues in a monk-like rhythm for
twenty years, his mandalas (squares in which a rotation animates itself) of
WORLD 3. Not those of the Chinese Tao, between WORLD 1 and WORLD 2.
This having been developed, we are now perhaps a little less disarmed to
envisage this Escalier de Montmartre (***LP, 92) photographed by Kertész in 1927,
and which hands over the hearth of his reasoning. The bars are somewhat thin,
diverse in nature, and in groups, in such a way that the light palpitates and
trembles everywhere, simultaneously triggering space and decompressing it,
almost annulling it. The background somehow hides from view behind the former,
but it is not with the aerialist project to derail the objectal identification,
but to prevent the gravitation to become more pronounced by a too-lively attraction
of what is top and what is bottom. We must look at Kertész’s photographs upside
down to grasp just how much the dimensions of the expanse are reversible, consequently
the nil weight. The exercise reaches the epitome of its demonstrative strength
when we tip Man Ray’s photographs to the side, since the latter also seeks the
evanescence through translucency and gleam, but never weightlessness.
With Atget, the poetry of the city was found in the semantic depth, in the
impressions in the endless exchanges of the cultural cycle. Here, it is found
in imponderable quantities of air. Instead of time loosing itself and finding
itself as in Atget’s work, or starting to well up, as with Strand, it
eternalises itself by thinning – not without interior speed – like
the expanse in which it vibrates.
Browsing through the Photo Poche on Kertész – admirably chosen
– we realise that his photographic subject – like Dorothea Lange’s
– is absolutely constant and patent from 1914 to his death, and to such
an extent that we can mention as a key of his photographic subject equivalently
a 1953’s hanging laundry photograph made in the United States, or a 1968’s
umbrellas in Tokyo (PP, 52), or still, a 1918’s fork (PP, 18). Kerkész, just
like Lange, founds his work on a certain angle. An angle is both imperative and
recognizable.
The title ‘Tulipe mélancolique’ dated 1939 (PP, 27) declares that
Kerkész’ mystical rectitude involves humour, the brother of tenderness. Is this
why he photographed acrobats (PP, 44) and dancers (AP, 254), which he defined
as satirical so much? This creates distant yet curious resonances between his
photographic subject and Kafka’s linguistic subject in German.
* and ** © J.H. Lartigue /
Association des amis de Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
*** and **** ©
André Kertész / Ministère de la Culture, France
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
AP: The Art of Photography, Yale University Press.
FS: On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, Art Institute of Chicago.
LP: Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs, Museum of Modem Art.
PF: Kozloff, Photography and Fascination, Addison.
PP: Photo Poche,Centre National de la Photographie, Paris.
PHPH: Philosophy of Photography.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.