Andre Kertesz, Fork, 1928
A photograph of a fork by Andre Kertesz (Paris, 1928). A fork and a plate are transformed, from two simple and overlooked items of everyday life into a new reality – a mysterious experience, a formal poetry.
An image that easily captures attention and stays long in memory. Maybe because we didn’t expect such a performance from the mundane and the taken for granted around us. Kertesz has masterly simplified here into an abstraction that take us by surprise. Maybe because we sense – reluctantly – that the fork hides so much about us. Things which reflect forms of social life and ways of individual self-discipline, entailed in the development of modern manners.
“My wife remembers vividly her first encounter with Norbert in Cambridge when he talked about the history of the fork and used this simple clue to analyse the process of civilization” wrote A. Glucksmann in an introduction to Norbert Elias’s work.