The Work of Atget: The Art of Old Paris

PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS

By Andy Grundberg

HUNGARIAN MEMORIES By Andre Kertesz. Introduction by Hilton Kramer. Illustrated. 194 pp. Boston: New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown & Co. $55. In 1912, the same year that he went to work at the Budapest Stock Exchange, 18-year-old Andre Kertesz acquired his first camera. Today, 70 years later, Mr. Kertesz is still photographing, and he is widely acknowledged as one of this century's most prolific, influential and lyric artists of the camera. ''Hungarian Memories'' contains more than 150 images made between 1912 and 1925, when the photographer left Budapest for Paris. It was in Paris that Mr. Kertesz's seemingly effortless style reached the height of its powers - where, for example, such masterpieces as ''Satiric Dancer'' and ''Chez Mondrian'' were taken - but even in his earliest Hungarian pictures, Mr. Kertesz's eye was remarkably assured. Examples abound, many of them classics: a couple wrapped in rapturous embrace (''Lovers,'' 1915); an underwater swimmer rendered headless by the refraction of water (''Esztergom,'' 1917); a blind fiddler being led down the street by a barefoot boy (''Abony,'' 1921). Other images, equally engaging, are reproduced here for the first time.

New York Times • Arts; Books • page 11 • 2,964 words