Self-Portrait, Paris is conjured from practically nothing: parts of a door and a wall, the shadow of the photographer gripping the tripod attached to his camera. A shadow within a shadow, actually, because of the two light sources, one yielding an ordinary profile, the other, an oafish umbra.
Tucked into the picture’s upper-left corner is the only material object: the box lock on the door. The lock resembles a camera, with its covered keyhole as the lens, complete with focusing ring. What’s behind that keyhole? The image offers no clues. Self-Portrait, Paris is a scene from a shadow play. A meditation on photography, seeing, and self. A nod to thenegative-positive process, described by one of its inventors as “the art of fixing a shadow.”
Behind the real camera that winter night in 1927 stood a tall, scrawny, thirty-two-year-old transplant to Paris. André Kertész had arrived from his native Hungary sixteen months earlier on a train ticket purchased with a loan from a cousin. Paris represented his best hope to establish himself as a photographer. Whatever that meant. Photographers made their living from studio portraiture, newspaper work, or commercial jobs like supplying pictures for postcards. All that bored André. He wanted a more direct contact with life. But he did need to eat.
He spoke little French, nor did he believe he could learn. He had no savings. Often he skipped meals or made do with bread, butter, and milk, tallying the total of his purchases each night before bed. A baguette cost the equivalent of a nickel, a bottle of milk and cube of butter, fourteen cents. His eyes were irritated. He couldn’t sleep through the night, typically only two or three hours. Come afternoon, he might doze off on a park bench. In letters postmarked Budapest, André’s family and friends were pleading with him to forget France and come home. As for his Hungarian girlfriend—if she still was his girlfriend—she had ordered him not to come home until he made a success of his life. In the eight years since the Great War ended, he had struggled to square his passion for photography with the pressure he felt to achieve worldly success. Yet he’d left Hungary still “a nobody” in his estimation and hers.
From his first hours in Paris, André had drifted through its parks and streets, brimming with inquisitive wonder about this city he was interpreting with his Goerz Tenax, a favorite camera—his companion, his accomplice, almost his double. Locals tended to scurry by this lost-looking foreigner. But a bevy of friends eased his isolation. Nearly all were Paris-savvy émigré artists centered in Montparnasse, mostly Hungarians. André lingered in their studios, admired their art, showed up at their parties. He would photograph, later giving prints to each of his friends. As they arranged themselves for a group picture—some laughing, some draping an arm on a friend’s shoulder, one clutching a violin, another a bottle—André would position his camera on a tripod and set the timer, then dash in to include himself, affable, bright-eyed, and grinning.
Most of his days included a stop at the Hungarian table on the terrace of the Café du Dôme, where every free spirit in Paris landed sooner or later. There his pals introduced him around and started a buzz about his unorthodox portraits, still lifes, and urban scenes, which they passed hand to hand. That had brought André a scattering of commissions. Publicity shots for the string quartet of the Hungarian composer Paul Arma. Pictures of the Montmartre villa that the Viennese architect Adolf Loos was building for the Dada poet Tristan Tzara. Portraits of a doctor, a dancer, a bibliophile. The trickle of income had allowed him to rent the seventh-floor walkup on the rue de Vanves (today the rue Raymond Losserand) in the fourteenth arrondissement, where he took Self-Portrait, Paris. A maid’s room the size of a small storage space, it had no kitchen, bathroom, or heat. No one would describe the place as charming, even though André would fix it up with pictures, shelves, and linens sent by his mother. Hewas installing a darkroom. After sixteen months of lugging his belongings from one threadbare hotel or makeshift bedroom to another, borrowing or improvising workspace, his garret represented a victory. He had a door with a lock and a dormer window. He had an aerie. Almost a home. A French home.