Untitled (Distortion #6)

André Kertész arrived in Paris from Hungary in 1925. His timing as a photographer was fortunate: within a couple of years, new French magazines such as Vu, Voilà, and Regards were gaining a wide audience, and they turned to Kertész— along with Germaine Krull, Man Ray, Eli Lotar, and Brassai, among others—to fill their pages. Kertész made some of his most influential images while on assignment for these magazines, including a series of nudes commissioned by the racy Le Sourire in 1933. The photographer posed his models in front of funhouse mirrors like those in Paris’s Luna Park amusement grounds. He employed three mirrors and two women (one older, one younger), making almost two hundred images in sessions he later described as “absolute fun.” Twelve images appeared in the magazine—a series as unsettling as it was seductive.