Taking up photography at age 18, and being amongst the first unofficial war photographers till he was wounded in 1915, the Hungarian Kertesz moved to Paris in the 1920s and began photographing the artists and dancers there, exhibiting his work along with the likes of Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Lisette Model and Philippe Halsman. In 1933, he was commissioned by the Parisian humour magazine La Sourire to take some nude photographs, and he employed a fun-house (fun-fair) distorting mirror to do this, returning to a theme of distortions that he had explored back in Hungary, shooting swimmers underwater. These delightful ‘surrealistic’ photographs are very much in the spirit of the time – Dali had painted ‘The Persistence of Memory’ with its melting distortions in 1931.