Distortions
”For a long time it was thought that the bulk of the Distortions were permanently lost to us. The original glass-plate negatives had suffered severe and disfiguring oxidation, and technicians despaired at the task of restoring them. But the work has now been done, and Kertész’s remarkable achievement is now published in full for the first time--an achievement certain to influence photography, to bring us pleasure, and to revise our understanding of the visual art of our time.” -Hilton Kramer, Introduction
FIRST EDITION of Kertész’s famous surrealist photo-series (first exhibited in 1932), reprinted from the original glass negatives that had been restored in the early 1970s. Complete with 120 photographs reproduced in gravure.
“Kertész was one of a group of Surrealist photographers and artists who challenged the principles of Realism in the 1920s and 1930s. By displacing and interrupting traditional and complacent perceptions, they aimed to disorganize and transfigure the normalcy of the everyday... [By] playing with things that people took for granted in their daily lives... the Surrealists released new visions from within the most mundane and standard products of peoples’ lives... In his distortion series, Kertész’s played a double game, using the most everyday of objects (the body) while disorganizing the most everyday or representational institutions, the rhetoric of photographic technology...
“Importantly, Kertész’s distortions forced the spectator to think, to question and wonder about what he or she was looking at and, especially, to think about how the human body should be represented; indeed, what the human body meant and how it is defined. Kertész made body morphology ambiguous; what is usually seen as beautiful or sensuous becomes grotesque... Looking at Kertész’z distortions forces viewers to produce their own meanings within the process of looking at the human body; events of looking at the body become series of discoveries in which the spectator ricochets from what is secure in the observable world to the distorted representation of that reality, and then back again to the secure” (Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines).
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Quarto (9 x 11.5 in), original gray cloth, original pictorial dust jacket. Book fine, with only faint offsetting to endpapers from dust jacket flaps (as usual), dust jacket with a few spots of soiling and small closed tear at top edge of rear panel. An outstanding copy.
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