“My work is inspired by my life. I express myself through my photographs. Everything that surrounds me provokes my feelings"
~ André Kertész (1895-1985)
Who better to launch our Paris adventure? This photograph for me has always been one of the most devastatingly powerful images in the history of photography. André Kertész first took this image in 1931, of his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth, whom he reunited with and married after his first unhappy brief marriage dissolved. In the original cropping he gazes adoringly at her, his head turned in near profile. He was reunited 40 years later with this negative that he thought had been lost for ever. He 'reinterpreted' this image into this 'new' cropping. It now becomes something else. A portrait of a long marriage and what they have both experienced together - displacement to a new country and a new way of life. Elizabeth was a solid support for both emotional and financial stability through all those years. Kertész was trying to find his own creative place in a completely different and often hostile environment than he was used to. In his very creative and productive years in Paris he was considered on an equal artistic footing to his friend Mondrian and many others. He floundered for many years in New York where his work was thought as too 'poetic' for the magazines he struggled to work for and with. He was distraught when Elizabeth passed away. He lost his anchor and best friend. In a single frame he tells the story of their life together.