That June, AEAR presented Documents de la Vie Sociale at the Galerie de la Pléiade, the city’s only gallery devoted exclusively to photography. The exhibition underscored the organization’s rejection of avant-garde aesthetics and embrace of politicized practice. It comprised three sections: art photographs co-opted for political purposes (André’s among them); documentation of anti-fascist struggles; and an album of photographs of the 1871 populist insurrection known as the Paris Commune. André had unearthed the album at a flea market and loaned it for the occasion.

  On the heels of that exhibition came Bastille Day. That morning, French Communists, Socialists, radicals, and trade unionists packed a stadium in Montrouge, just south of Paris. Speakers vowed allegiance to the Popular Front, a coalition of Communists and leftists sanctioned by Moscow and sworn to defend the nation against Fascist aggression. André spent the morning photographing at the stadium and that afternoon on the streets of working-class eastern Paris. There a sea of militants flowed from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Nation, fists clenched, red flags and tricolors streaming. They demanded bread, peace, liberty, and a Popular Front platform in the elections scheduled for the following spring. Meanwhile, French Fascists marched along their own via sacra, the Champs-Elysées, stiffening their arms in the Nazi salute.

  André sold his pictures to publications like Regards, a Communist-friendly clone of Vu, and for posters for the Popular Front. Many other photographers happily threw themselves into such work. André, for his part, considered such publications “stupidly doctrinaire.”[54]

  That fall, he accepted a more congenial assignment to photograph the Hungarian thermal baths. He and Elizabeth traveled to Budapest, where they stayed for two months with Imre and Gréti, who were now married. Judging by André’s family snapshots, that winter was a respite. He photographed family and friends with a feeling of warmth like in the old days. They sit laughing in cafés or chatting in rooms decorated with Christmas trees, their tables cluttered with cake plates, wineglasses, and cigarette packs. Tihanyi was in Budapest and sometimes joined them.

  Back in France that spring, André submitted his first assignment for Vu in nine months. It introduced a novel process for printing wallpaper with rollers, hardly the stuff of thrilling reportage. April also marked his final appearance on the cover. Vu’s art director was now a debonair twenty-three-year-old from Kiev named Alexander Liberman. His mother was one of Vogel’s mistresses.[55] Poised with scissors over his photographers’ prints, Liberman was putting together avant-garde photomontages about Germany’s Nazification and France’s political strife. That April, he used a photograph that André took in his early months in Paris showing two lightning bolts hitting the Eiffel Tower. Liberman added a close-up of a fighter plane and the words “GERMAN AIR STRIKE.” What once conveyed excitement now portended terror.

  Displeased as he must have been with this use of his photograph, André needed the money. His monthly income was averaging 1,300 francs, minus professional expenses of up to 500 francs.[56] Five years earlier, he had sometimes earned more than 10,000 francs monthly. Now it was only thanks to Elizabeth that the couple could make ends meet.

  Elizabeth must have arrived in France hoping for success as an artist. Her closest friends were creating, exhibiting, and selling their work. André had made it in Paris. She was a graduate of the esteemed Álmos Jaschik school with some fifteen years of art-making behind her. Yet she felt discouraged by the brilliance of the art she was seeing in Paris. She was also a practical woman. So she had put aside her paints and easel and taken a job with the cosmetics company Helena Rubinstein.[57] Probably she made the connection through Rubinstein’s husband, the American journalist and bookseller Edward Titus, whom André knew from the Dôme and had photographed. Just temporary, she may have been telling herself and André.

  A chagrined André would have remembered his mother, slaving away at the coffee shop to compensate for his father’s shortcomings as a breadwinner. André’s status as a successful photographer had sealed Elizabeth’s commitment to their life together. Not long ago, he’d been “the prince of Paris,” as a friend later described him.[58] Now they needed her income, and she was not above wagging her finger. When the two were really pinched, they tapped into André’s inheritance from Ernesztina. He had converted the money into ten kilograms (about twenty-two pounds) of gold bars, deposited at a bank in Zurich.[59] He and Elizabeth were “scraping along,” he wrote in an August letter to Jenő that received no reply. “Morally I succeed but we better not talk about the material rewards.”[60]

  Krull had also fallen from grace. Now living in the South of France, she had been mostly unemployed since 1933. Brassaï, however, cut a wide swath. He was publishing in Vu, Vogue, Votre Beauté, Le Jardin des Modes, and Harper’s Bazaar, often pictures of artists and glitterati. It helped that he was an ebullient personality. “Suddenly I was in such demand,” Brassaï bragged to his parents in 1935, “that it was as if I were the only reporter in Paris.”[61]

  Life was also improving for André’s protégé Endre Friedman. Under the tutelage of his German-born girlfriend, Gerta Pohorylle, Friedman had cut his unruly mop, started shaving, and sometimes even donned a suit. Such moves earned the approval of André, who understood French snobbery and had never failed to present himself correctly. One day Friedman arrived at the Kertészes’ apartment, buoyant even though he had only two francs to his name. He was wildly in love.[62]

  He and Pohorylle would soon reinvent themselves as Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Friedman’s pseudonym derived from the name of the American film director Frank Capra and from cápa, the Hungarian word for “shark.” This name change allowed Taro to sell her boyfriend’s pictures as those of the American celebrity photographer Robert Capa — not the Hungarian loser Endre Friedman. Vogel, for one, found the whole business absurd. Once, in Geneva, he watched Friedman photograph the police roughing up a journalist. Not long after that, he was offered those photographs, signed “Robert Capa.” The editor snorted: “This is all very interesting about Robert Capa, but please advise the ridiculous boy Friedmann, who goes around shooting pictures in a dirty leather jacket, to report to my office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”[63] Vogel purchased the pictures.

  Jews in Hungary, Hungarians in France, and later Central Europeans in the United States and travelers everywhere, both Capa and André were perennial outsiders who embellished anecdotes about their own lives. Friedman invented a fantasy self named Robert Capa; André embroidered on the facts of his life. Their colleague Burt Glinn used to laugh when he was asked about some Capa episode: “Do you want to know the truth or the Hungarian Empire version?”[64] “Life was so absurd,” writes Capa’s biographer, “what did it matter if he changed a few details?”[65] By all evidence, André agreed.

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  In a crowning event for photography as modern art, an international exhibition opened in January 1936 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a museum housed in a wing of the Louvre. Photographs by Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Brassaï, André, and scores of others — some 1,500 pictures in all — had made it into one of the world’s most prestigious art venues. The chief curator, Charles Peignot, had sought work from André early on. But it took two letters to coax him into delivering his prints. Maybe he was still sore about the book deal he’d scrubbed nearly five years earlier because of Peignot’s lowball offer. Maybe he was too depressed. André took no remarkable photographs in 1935. In a review of Paris Vu in La Nouvelle Revue Française, Eugène Dabit lamented that “Today perhaps one pays less attention to his work. That’s a real mistake.”[66] But so it was.

  Then one day André took a call from Alexandre Garai, who headed the Paris office of the Keystone Press Agency. Keystone was the brainchild of Alexandre’s brother, a tough little Hungarian named Bernát Garai. Founded in London in 1924, the agency had become a big player in the fiercely competitive world of hard news, operating out of London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Alexandre inquired: Might André be interested in working for Keystone in New York? He proposed that André handle reportage and fashion. It had not escaped André’s attention that celebrity portraiture and fashion photography could be very lucrative. Edward Steichen, who worked for American Vogue and Vanity Fair and had star billing in Peignot’s exhibition, ranked as the world’s highest-paid photographer.

  Undecided about the offer, André, as usual, sought Imre’s advice. His brother reported that Hungarians genuflected at the mention of Keystone. However, Imre cautioned, “I am incapable of assessing the reality of a photo factory like that with all of its commercial brutality and nastiness, and even if I were capable that would in no way change the situation, which is above all and imperatively a question of making money.” Imre ventured some alternatives. Don’t hide behind modesty, he counseled André. Follow the money. Why not do sequels to Paris Vu? Imagine New York Seen by André Kertész! Or Chicago. Why not contact Charlie Chaplin to see if the actor-director could use André’s talents? Why not move to London, where there were “high quality Hungarians”?[67] But André understood better than Imre the distance between “why not” and steady paychecks.

  What was certain was that Paris was no longer working. Even André’s book projects stalled. Wittmann embraced his idea of doing a book about Chartres Cathedral. But when they arrived in Chartres, they found the building’s west portal covered with scaffolding. So André aborted the project. Meanwhile he had reclaimed the rights to the Distortions and was shopping that project around. But it too went nowhere.

  The political and social backdrop for André’s decision about Keystone’s offer was the triumph of the French Popular Front in May’s general election. Crowds poured into the streets to celebrate and demand that the new government use its mandate to act on behalf of the working class. Walkouts and sit-ins closed factories. Cafés rolled down their shutters. The government responded by boosting wages, passing labor reforms, and guaranteeing an annual two-week paid vacation. A paid vacation! No one could believe it. Swept up in that summer’s holiday spirit, people turned the keys on their doors, packed into jalopies and trains, and took off. Half of France seemed to be frolicking by the sea or fox-trotting in the streets. Yes but — prudent voices sounded—we are dancing on a volcano. The rightists were seething, the stock market sank, the rich smuggled their money out of the country.

  André’s mood matched that summer’s weather in Paris, unsettled and gray. Elizabeth hated the New York idea. André dithered. Determined to seal the deal, Bernát Garai’s nephew Erney Prince, a commercial photographer who managed Keystone in New York, arrived in Paris and invited André to lunch. As André prepared to leave their apartment, Elizabeth half joked, but only half, that if he accepted Prince’s offer, she would divorce him. Yet André had sold and spent nine of the ten kilograms of gold he’d inherited from Ernesztina.[68] Something had to change. As a bonus, the Keystone job would put an ocean between Rogi and him.

  André’s annual salary was set at $4,000 (about $90,000 in 2024 dollars), plus an 8 percent commission. Those figures agree with André’s later recollection that Keystone had paid him $80 to $100 a week or $4,160 to $5,200 annually.[69] That was excellent money at a time when the median annual family income in the United States was $1,070.[70] Yet André judged the contract disadvantageous because it gave the agency exclusive rights to his work. He felt he’d made a Faustian pact, signing away his freedom. Indeed, no sooner had the ink dried than he told Imre and Gréti that his time in America would come to naught.[71] He remembered Tihanyi’s dismal experience. He considered Americans vacuous and spoiled.[72] He didn’t want to live in New York.

  Later André would claim that he’d intended only to take a sabbatical.[73] “There was no reason [to leave Paris],” he lied. “We had everything … But then I had lunch with Erney Prince and he talked me into coming over for a while. So I said to my wife, ‘Look, why don’t we go for a year, just to have a change.’ It was never my intention to stay.”[74] Yet his and Elizabeth’s visas, fast-tracked thanks to Keystone’s clout, gave them full immigrant status. They could take as much as they wanted without paying customs duties.

  Prince followed their meeting with a letter instructing André about how to prepare. He wrote in English because his Hungarian was rusty. “I remind you repeatedly,” he told André, “that it is very important that by the time you arrive here, you bubble something in English. Consequently, look at it that you study very seriously until you arrive here.”[75] Three weeks later came another letter: “Study, study and again study the English, so that when you arrive, you could bubble already something. Further, study the fashion-photo, page the American Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar … Style is needed here — so you have to concentrate yourself to it.”[76] André may have scrutinized the magazines, but he ignored Prince’s directive about bubbling English.

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  August brought shocking news of Eugène Dabit’s death from scarlet fever during a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union. On September 7, Elizabeth and André would have been among the five thousand mourners at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Disillusioned by what he observed in the supposed workers’ paradise and horrified by world events, Dabit had penned a final entry in his diary: “We are hunted, we are lost. Life, in this world, becomes unthinkable.”[77] Yet that day at Père Lachaise, French Communist heavyweights speechified about Dabit’s “complete moral satisfaction” in the Soviet Union.[78] Their hypocrisy surely deepened André’s distaste for the ideologies reordering his life.

  The most dramatic struggle was unfolding in Spain. In July, Fascist military units had launched a revolt that became a savage civil war pitting them against the democratically elected Republican government. In August, the self-rebaptized, Leica-slung Bob Capa and Gerda Taro boarded a plane in Toulouse. Vogel, also aboard, was leading Vu’s pack of reporters into the conflict. Coming into Barcelona, the plane crash-landed. Vogel was hospitalized, but all survived. Only weeks after that ill-fated flight, Capa would snap a frame of what appears to be a bullet-struck Spanish Loyalist soldier at the split-second of death. Later a controversy would erupt over the authenticity of The Falling Soldier. But not until after it became the most famous war photograph of the twentieth century.

  Vogel published the image in a special thematic issue of Vu that took an editorial stance in support of the Spanish Republicans. That stance enraged the magazine’s Swiss shareholders and sent advertising revenues tumbling. Vu was already running at a deficit. Vogel — to André, a “boss-comrade” and “protector of photographers”—was ousted.[79]

  André’s life continued unsettled that early fall. He was trying to collect an old debt from a Hungarian friend to help pay for his visa and moving expenses. He may or may not have succeeded, but he did shore up his finances by supplying baby pictures to Nestlé and illustrating a twelve-page self-promotional volume for Sainrapt et Brice, a manufacturer of glass vats used in the wine industry. When the company first approached him about doing the photographs for Les Cathédrales du Vin, they found his fee too steep. Financially hurting or not, André was not about to discount his work. So another photographer got the job. But Sainrapt et Brice was unhappy with the result. So they went back to André, who delivered the elegant images they were after. Grandiose, mysterious, and silent, the wine-aging room André photographed feels like a sanctum. Sainrapt et Brice knew its snobby clientele.

  Les Cathédrales du Vin couldn’t be more different from André’s other last-minute publication. Two days in the country yielded enough animal pictures for Wittmann to cobble together Nos Amies les Bêtes (Our Friends the Animals). The book would not appear until after André left Paris. When André finally held it in his hands, he judged it overstuffed and poorly laid out.[80] He was right, it’s forgettable.

  He had much on his mind that September, including thousands of negatives, contact sheets, and prints. Cut into strips of six or so frames and stored in glassine envelopes, the roll-film negatives were lightweight and relatively easy to pack. So were the larger-format film negatives. But the glass-plate negatives were not. At Prince’s urging, André selected a few to take to New York in hopes of publication. The rest he entrusted to his French journalist friend Jacqueline Paouillac. They agreed that Paouillac would promote and sell his images, with earnings to be split fifty-fifty. Valid for one year, their contract would automatically renew unless one of them wrote the other to break it.

  Domestic tasks pressed too. Before he and Elizabeth dismantled their home, André staged a few pictures. One surveys their usually immaculate living room: rugs bunch up, pillows sag, André’s freshly washed black socks dry on a cord like abacus beads. His dress pants and white shirt are draped over a chair, a wrinkled heap as surrogate self. Outside the open window, the city murmurs on. Everything is rendered in the pearly light of Paris, André’s raison d’être for the past eleven years, his “bonne copine“ (girlfriend) as he would call it.[81]

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  A few days before André and Elizabeth departed, a government official showed up at the rue du Cotentin to offer André French citizenship based on his artistic achievement. Or so André later professed, adding that a journalist acquaintance had arranged the matter. The story is suspect. Such an offer from the Popular Front government would have been highly unusual. Probably André was improving on reality. Maybe he misunderstood. He could not imagine a more gratifying offer, he would add, but he had to follow through on his contractual agreement with Keystone.[82] More relevantly, French citizenship would not have fixed his financial woes.