A Beginner All His Life

This week’s Economist magazine reviews an exhibition of work by Andre Kertesz, the Hungarian photographer who died in 1985, which is on show in Los Angeles and New York this autumn.
“You don’t see the things you photograph, you feel them,” he’s quoted as saying, giving words of inspiration for all of us stumbling to create.
The Economist also quotes him as seeing himself as “forever a beginner who discovers the world again and again.”
Read the Economist’s full review if you can. Here’s just a part of it: “In an age when photography was not yet an established profession, the unconfident Kertesz dabbled at a series of day jobs - first as a bank teller and then as a beekeeper – until his girlfriend, Elisabeth Salamon, an artist, insisted he leave Budapest and seriously try his hand at photography. In 1925 he moved to France. Poor and lonely, he created some of the most poetic images of Paris ever captured on film.”
I hate the fact that his early life story supports the myth of the artist as marginal and poverty-stricken. But I love the spirit of the man, forever a beginner. If you’re just beginning to write, remember that Kertesz gloried in the essence of a beginner all his life.