In Focus

Sixty portraits of twentieth-century Germans.

This elegant book unites all of the known carte postale prints by the photographer Andre Kertesz (1894-1985), including portraits, views of Paris, careful studio scenes, and exquisitely simple still lifes. Essays shed new light on the artist's most acclaimed images; themes of materiality, exile, and communication; his illustrious and bohemian social circle; and the changing identity of art photography. Playful yet refined, the book's design reflects the spirit of 1920s Paris while underscoring the modernity of the catalogue's more than 250 illustrated works. Kertesz made his rigorously composed prints on inexpensive but lush postcard stock, sharing them with friends and sending them back to family in Hungary. The works reveal the artist learning his craft as he encountered an international group of modernists-including Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, and Joseph Csaky-in the interwar metropolis. Prized by collectors as well as by Kertesz himself, the cartes postales influenced his compositions and the intimate scale of his picture making for decades. Exhibition: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA (02.10.2021-17.01.2022) / High Museum of Art, Atlanta, USA (18.02-29.50.2022).

"Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) was one of the most important and innovative photographers of the nineteenth century. Best known for her powerful portraits, she also posed her sitters - friends, family and servants - as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories. Her photographs were rule breaking: intentionally out-of-focus, and often included scratches, smudges and other traces of her process. In her lifetime, Cameron was criticised for her unconventional techniques, but also widely celebrated for the beauty of her comopositions and her conviction that photography was an art form. This book draws upon the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection of Cameron's photographs and correspondence to shed light on previously unacknowledged aspects of her experimental approach."

109 pages : 22 cm

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, writer, graphic and stage designer, teacher, and photographer. Working in his native Hungary as well as in Germany, Holland, England, and the United States, Moholy-Nagy constantly experimented in these various fields, leaving a remarkable legacy of innovation. The J. Paul Getty Museum owns eighty-two photographs by Moholy-Nagy, almost fifty of which are presented in this volume, the second in the Museum's In Focus series on photographers. The plates are accompanied by commentaries by Katherine Ware, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs. Ms. Ware, along with Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Charles Hagen, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Weston Naef, and Leland Rice, participated in a colloquium on the life and work of Moholy-Nagy at the Museum in 1994. An edited transcript of this discussion and a chronology of significant events in the artist's life are also included in this book.