The closing exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum’s André Kertész 130 exhibition series The Trick of Forgetting. A selection of polaroids by André Kertész opens on his birthday at the Robert Capa Centre for Contemporary Photography. The exhibition will feature forty polaroid images taken in the 1970s and 80s, from material purchased in 2021 from New York.
In his late Polaroids, André Kertész turns his own apartment into his studio, where books, photographs, objects and the perspectives offered by the window provide the raw material with which he begins to work. He also makes frequent use of the contrast of light and shadow, and he often takes his earlier photographs and reinterprets them in a new context, reinterpreting a piece of his past. But what he is really strong at is the puppetry of personified objects.
The polaroid images in his album From My Window, dedicated to his dead wife, are the result of years of mourning. The mourning process is only one layer of the tiny colour compositions. Reinterpreted motifs from Kertész’s earlier paintings can also be found in the late Polaroids. As if the elderly artist “wanted to remember an earlier one with each image”.
“Slowly, slowly, slowly I started taking pictures. But soon I got hooked… I worked mornings and late afternoons. The sky is beautiful in the morning light, and late afternoon is very varied. In the mornings I started and just photographed, photographed, photographed, I had no time to eat. I found that time had passed and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. Same in the afternoon…I forgot my medication. I forgot myself, the pain, the hunger and yes, the sadness.” (André Kertész, 1981)
Such a recollection of the past in the present is also a re-creation of memories, an inevitable alteration. In other words, remembering is always forgetting; creative ways of recalling, of healing creation, are hardly the trick of forgetting.
Eva Fisli