The spur of the moment

A memorable image by André Kertész shows a steam train passing over a high viaduct behind a row of peeling French houses next to a demolition site while a man in a suit and hat with his back to the train walks across the foreground, a mysterious painting-shaped item wrapped in newspaper under one arm. It is a moment caught.

The viewer, naturally, tries to connect the disparate elements. And to us it is not merely a moment but a moment in a place, from the past — when steam trains chuffed and men wore hats with suits — in this case 1928 at Meudon, a Parisian suburb. In this way, photography attains the highest form of art to which painters aspired in post-Renaissance theory: that of history painting. True, it is not the history of famous figures; it is a genre piece left for history to work its slow transformation upon. But it is as well to be aware that this accidental enchantment has been added to the art of photography, just as, for an archaeologist, the exciting story told by a poor pot-sherd quite outdoes its ceramic virtues. Kertész (1894–1985) did not leave poor pot-sherds, although his first proper retrospective is only now being held, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (until February). Michel Frizot and Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq have put together the catalogue (Yale, £48).

The career of André Kertész fell into three parts: a decade in his native Hungary, a decade in France, then, from 1936, half a century in New York. Henri Cartier-Bresson called Kertész one of his masters. Some affinities are obvious. Two thumbnails in the book show his studies of the viaduct at Meudon, without train and with. It was the passing of the man with the mysterious object that provided the tertium quid of the decisive moment.