Enormously increased print size and archival quality color are the two technological innovations that over that last few decades let photography compete with other media for big bucks in the high-stakes art world. But as Vicki Goldberg instructs us in “Light Matters,” size is not enough: “All too often that is all there is: uninteresting images inflated to levels of unearned authority, scale as a substitute for invention.”

We have become so habituated to unnecessary giganticism – for example, Richard Avedon’s 11-by-35-foot picture of Andy Warhol’s Factory crew at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – that it is a shock to enter the “Andre Kertesz” exhibition at the International Center of Photography and see 30-odd itty-bitty images hardly larger than postage stamps on display in the first section. When I viewed the exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, a woman who had prudently brought a magnifying glass was giving the pictures the inspection they deserve, because Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) is one of the masters of photography, and his greatness is visible even in these tiny early works.

When Kertesz was 18 years old, his mother gave him and his brother Jeno an Ica box camera that took 4.5-by-6-cm glass plates. Although he had been an indifferent student in school, and would be an indifferent employee when he began working, Andre was a passionately enthusiastic photographer. He shot friends and family, made excursions into the Hungarian countryside to shoot, critiqued his results with Jeno, and made friends in Budapest’s active art community.

The prints on display at ICP from this period are small because Kertesz did not have an enlarger and so could only produce contact prints, but they already display many of his strengths: straightforward and meaningful composition, intense engagement with the quotidian, and emotional resonance. Throughout his career, in the best of his pictures, Andre Kertesz was able to transfer something directly from his heart to the heart of the viewer.

From 1914 to 1918 Kertesz served in the Austro-Hungarian army, and the Ica went with him. He took pictures of peasants in his rural outposts and he took pictures of his fellow soldiers. “Latrine, Gologory, Poland” (1915-16), shows four weary soldiers sitting side by side on a log with their pants down, the one on the right reaching behind to swab his butt. This is enormously sympathetic, the polar opposite of the usual heroic depictions of the military. By the time he was mustered out of the army, Kertesz had won photographic competitions, had pictures published, and already taken several of the images on which his reputation lies.

Kertesz wrote in his diary on July 10, 1924, that Elizabeth Salamon, his love, told him, “I am tired of this situation. In the winter of 1924-1925 I want to be a bride. Either this will happen, or you go away and until you establish an existence you do not come for me, and we do not even correspond.”

So Andre, who prided himself on being an amateur, resolved to become a professional photographer, and to “go away” to Paris to do it. He was one of an incredible cohort of Hungarian Jewish young men who left home, changed their names, and became world-famous photographers: Robert and Cornell Capa, Brassai, Martin Munkasci, David “Chim” Seymour, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who did not change his name.) Kertesz soon established himself in the cosmopolitan art world of postwar Paris, and eventually married Elizabeth.

By the time he left Paris for New York in 1936, Kertesz had created a body of work that defined the city and the photography of that period. “Paris Vu par Andre Kertesz,” a book of 60 photographs published in 1934 with text by Pierre Mac Orlan, is one of the great artistic achievements of an era famous for its accomplishments.

“Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe” (1926) is a marvel of simplicity and sophistication, echoing in the arrangement of the white table and black background the compositions of the abstract painter. “Fork” (1928) is even more dramatic in its reduction of subject matter, the way it makes something new of a commonplace object; this is the very “invention” Vicki Goldberg calls for. “Meudon” (1928) is more complex, though (as is typical in Kertesz’s work), we take it in all at once. As serendipitous as the location looks, he shot it more than once, waiting for the oneiric elements – the train on the viaduct, the man with the picture mysteriously wrapped in newspaper – to present themselves.

It was fortuitous that a business deal gone bad brought Andre and Elizabeth to America in advance of the Nazi subjugation of Europe, but Kertesz did not fare well here. Edward Steichen, then head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, ignored him. Life magazine never published him. Alexander Liberman gave him a generous contract to work for House and Garden, but it was work he was not congenial with. “Homing Ship” (1944) exemplifies his depressed state: a rainy day, a distant solitary figure carrying an elaborately rigged model from the boat basin in Central Park. Kertesz saw himself as a ship out of water, and in fact, his gentle, intensely humane images were not what commanded attention in America at this time.

The wheel of his fortune turned again, however. John Szarkowski was appointed curator of photography at MoMA in 1962 and, after including Kertesz’s work in several group shows, gave him a retrospective exhibition in 1964. The rising generation of photographers – Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand – appreciated what Kertesz had done, studied it, and incorporated his style in their own. The public and the art market caught up with him, making him famous again and, for the first time, wealthy.

In spite of failing health and the loss of his beloved Elizabeth, he continued to shoot. Many of his pictures are scenes of Washington Square Park and Greenwich Village that he took from the windows of his apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue, and others are from his rambling about New York as he had strolled about Paris decades ago. “‘Buy,’ Long Island University” (1962) is still the work of a master, an exquisitely composed, stark, and compassionate study of urban alienation.

Vicki Goldberg is right: It isn’t the size of the print that matters, but the size of the talent, the vision, the heart.

Until November 27 (1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, 212-857-0045).