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March 2005
Coming out of windy streets, a sharp winter light flattening
the metallic Manhattan angles, a group of modernist pictures
not any bigger than daguerreotypes confront us, the legacy
of a gifted photographer who died much too young in a concentration
camp.
Looking at Imre Kinszki’s photographs, never before
shown in New York, the game of influences and resemblances
is easy enough to play: There is modernism in his extreme
close-ups and angles from above, in his choice of subjects
such as train tracks or a typewriter’s keys. We might
think of early André Kertesz images, such as that of
his brother’s shadow projected at night on a house’s
whitewashed wall.
But although Kinszki was a sophisticated artist, evidently
attuned to Moholy-Nagy’s writings and to the work of
Brassai, Paul Wolff and Albert Renger-Patzsch (Kinszki corresponded
with all of them and was a founding member of the group Modern
Hungarian Photographers, a circle of artists close in
spirit to the New Objectivity), these comparisons are ultimately
unsatisfying. They only brush the surface of his work, missing
its true singularity.
[ Click
above to view works ] |
Photography is traditionally compared to painting. Yet in Kinszki’s
case the imagery has the resonance of a discreet music and the
tactility of a marble sculpture by Brancusi. He looks at a world
that is now disappeared, that of Budapest in the 1930s, and
his profound attention, akin to a meditation, detects mystery
in the quotidian.
Never before have we seen the pawn, queen and king of a chess
game take on such an eerie presence, towering like monuments.
A circle of winter poplars seems to dance and extend their branches
towards the sky. High open windows promise a peek into a room
that is denied by a white blind. The foam frothing like milk
at the flank of a boat, the glistening train tracks, the paved
streets are etched in ways both melancholy and almost giddy
with a secret joy.
The only full-face portrait in the show is that of a gypsy girl.
The other characters, absorbed in their occupations, are mostly
turning their backs to us, or walking away. A small girl stands
in a building’s entrance and her elongated shadow extends
towards the foot of the staircase, as if ready to climb. The
artists ’s daughter Judit is relaxed in sleep under a
delicate net of shadows while her open-eyed doll is on guard
to protect her from nighttime’s ghosts.
Kinszki has a predilection for the deepest moment of the night,
when just a few windows are lit in a courtyard, letting us imagine
life in the hidden rooms. He loves slate roofs, empty streets
streaked with snow, or soaked in a spring rain’s dewy
brilliance.
A Jew from the intelligentsia, Kinszki died at the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp in early spring of 1945, just before the
war’s end. In retrospect his work seems haunted by a sense
of life’s poignancy and precariousness. Kinszki is a poet
uninterested by exoticism, excess and militancy, attuned to
small miracles drawn in light and shadows. His acute epiphanies
of everyday life now touch us like the light of long-disappeared
stars that have tumbled into the black hole of history.
-- Carole Naggar
Klotz/Sirmon Gallery
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.klotzsirmon.com
On view until March 26. |
