When I hit the Polaroid section of the André Kertész exhibition, I had to step back and look away. The emotional density peaks here, grief manifest in tiny little squares. Tears at least blur and soften the searing sorrow that permeates photographs of colored figurines leaning into one another against varying backgrounds. Kertesz loved his Elizabeth, lived with her for sixty years, lost her to death, then found her again in the form of a tiny glass figurine. He took her around and made more photographs, seeking resurrection perhaps. In a show that builds literally (early images the size of negatives gradually give way to larger prints) and conceptually (complexity of topic, expansion of means), you find yourself getting more roped in as the rooms keep coming, each one filled with more rawness than the next. His work is marked by very different phases – photography as seeing, as a business, and then again as a narrative art.
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