His camera captured the light side of humanity

“Andre Kertesz,” an exhibition of portraits, still-lifes and street scenes, has been installed with so little fanfare at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it almost seems to be an afterthought. Fortunately, this takes nothing away from the Hungarian photographer’s lovely little pictures, 113 of which line the walls of six small galleries in extremely loose chronological order.

Kertesz (1894-1985) made these handsomely printed images from 1912 to 1984. Some are carefully composed. Others suggest that the photographer, who proudly insisted that he was an amateur and could not abide the cleverness and virtuosity of professionalism, just happened to be in the right place at the right time -- with the right shutter speed, focus and framing -- to get the picture in a split second.

A few of Kertesz’s works are campy: theatrically posed setups with his brother hamming it up as if for a snapshot or prancing naked in the countryside, like the offspring of Icarus and the Wright brothers under the spell of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

His best photographs, which make up most of the exhibition, delight in overlooked moments whose pedestrian poetry would be crushed by the pompous ceremony of big-ticket, star-driven events. Being the proverbial man-in-the-street never looked better or made city life seem so enchanting.

The first gallery is the largest. It includes almost one-third of the exhibited works, nearly all of which were made from 1912 to 1925, when Kertesz lived in Budapest. They show the young photographer experimenting with subjects: crowds in the street, soldiers at rest, shadowy night scenes, misty landscapes and children at play.

Sober portraits are also displayed, along with playfully posed tableaux and pictures of his brother Jeno, leaping into the air at the beach, over a field (like Yves Klein ahead of his time) and in the woods, like a sprite.

Warmhearted humor suffuses Kertesz’s art. It’s especially vivid in a group portrait of four Hungarian soldiers seated shoulder-to-shoulder under a tree in a field. None of the men looks into the lens; instead they gaze off in various directions, as if lost in their thoughts. As a group, they convey a sense of casual contemplation. The title, “Latrine, Gologory, Poland,” reveals just how down-to-earth the picture is -- depicting the men on a four-seat toilet -- while still being dignified, tasteful and not the least bit bawdy. Kertesz respectfully intermingles private and public.

Part of this has to do with the photograph’s tiny size. To see it, viewers must step up close, one at a time. You almost have to squint.

Nearly all of Kertesz’s early works are barely larger than postage stamps. The minuscule dimensions convey modesty, humility, unpretentiousness: They require intimate engagement. Today, when so much photography is gigantic, it’s shocking to see such little pictures with such lasting influence.

Other early works, such as “Camera in Landscape,” “Sleeping Boy” and “Meeting, Budapest,” mix subjectivity and objectivity by playing dark shadows against brightly lighted areas. The relationship between the individual and the group, or Everyman and everyone else, is a theme he zeroed in on early and returned to throughout his career.

The next two galleries feature works Kertesz made in Paris from 1925 to 1936. About the size of postcards, they take viewers on a tour of the city that bypasses standard highlights, except for the Eiffel Tower. In one work, it appears to dissolve in thick fog; in another, it casts its enormous shadow over people in the street, who appear to scramble like ants.

Most of Kertesz’s Paris pictures focus on empty park benches, tarp-covered book stalls, cafes closed for the night, romantic alleys and sun-dappled stairways. Some portray dancers striking theatrical poses or nude women reflected in fun-house mirrors, their bodies taking shapes too silly to be sexy. In other images, eyeglasses, pipes and forks stand in for their absent users, and shadows fall across tables, floors and buildings, often so melodramatically that it seems as if Kertesz is making fun of himself -- and having a wonderful time of it.

“Meudon” packs the Pop Surrealism of Rene Magritte into a page-size print, its top-hatted man carrying a newspaper-wrapped parcel beneath a towering bridge over which a dark locomotive thrusts. Kertesz’s most famous photograph, looking out from behind the glass face of the clock at the Academie Francaise, more elegantly attests to photography’s capacity to stop time in its tracks and juxtapose two or more worlds on a flat surface.

He often treated oddly juxtaposed objects as metaphors for psychological states, expressing lonely, wayward wistfulness with a light tough. Shadows and silhouettes often stand in for the individual’s immersion in and distance from the tumult of urban life. A deep appreciation of life’s little absurdities is palpable.

The next two galleries survey the years Kertesz lived in New York, 1937 to 1985. A handful of masterpieces stand out, including “Washington Square” and “MacDougal Alley,” which Kertesz shot after anonymous passersby left their footprints in an inch of freshly fallen snow. Also shot from a window high above street level is an image of bare tree branches and silhouetted folks in heavy coats, and another, made on a trip to Tokyo, of 12 umbrella-toting businessmen crossing the street in unison, as if they belonged in a chorus line.

But many of Kertesz’s pictures from this nearly 50-year span are formulaic, somewhat cutesy rehashes of earlier images or overloaded metaphors that come off as heavy-handed and cliched.

The final gallery has no wall label identifying the time and place its 10 works were made. It’s simply a hodgepodge of prints from 1940 to 1980. Some are terrific, but the overall impression is that the curators lost interest and just stuck the leftovers here. The attic-like atmosphere is reinforced by the pop music that pours into the last few galleries from Edward Kienholz’s “Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” part of the museum’s permanent collection installed just beyond the exit of the Kertesz exhibition, which seems to peter out rather than end conclusively.

Even so, the exhibition, which was organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, with the assistance of the Andre and Elizabeth Kertesz Foundation, is well worth a visit.

Kertesz had an eye for those curiously serendipitous moments that disappear in a blink. His photographs capture the chaotic jostle of urban life, but only in those rare instances when it seems to have arranged itself in compositions so exquisite it’s hard to believe they were not orchestrated.

Kertesz’s greatest talent -- his genius -- lives on in his intimate pictures. They make you feel as if you’re not only seeing the world through his patient eyes but discovering its little wonders and quotidian epiphanies for yourself.

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‘Andre Kertesz’

Where: Los Angeles County

Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.,

Los Angeles

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays

Ends: Sept. 5

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org