Everything Is Photograph
A Life of André Kertész
The first full biography of the innovative “father of modern photography” vividly depicts his life and works, from Hungary to France and America, across the 20th century.
Born in Budapest in 1894, André Kertész soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through 14 years of shooting for House & Garden, then improbably reemerged into the spotlight with a 1964 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. By the time of his death in 1985, he had exhibited around the world, taken more than 100,000 images, and steered the medium in new and vital directions: He was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica, the camera now mythically linked to street photography, and he pioneered subjective photojournalism, publishing what is arguably the world’s first great photo essay.
Drawing on dozens of interviews, previous scholarship, and deep archival research, and interrogating the images themselves, Patricia Albers retrieves aspects of Kertész’s life that he and his pictures gloss over, among them the ordeals of trench warfare, the impact of the Holocaust, and the tale of his tangled romances. She takes Kertész from the Eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively Central European diaspora. From Condé Nast’s postwar media empire to the photo boom of the 1970s. She revisits Kertész’s relationships with other photographers, among them his frenemy Brassaï and his protégé Robert Capa. She breathes life into a gentle, generous, and unassuming man endowed with Old World charm but also sputtering with grievance and rage and inclined to indulge in deception.
Everything Is Photograph immerses readers in the heyday of a now lost version of photography. Formally vigorous, emotionally rich, and aesthetically charged, Kertész’s images speak of the medium as a tool for human connection, self-narration, self-invention, and inquiry about the world, even as they project its mysteries.
Praise & Reviews
Superlative arts biographer Albers … is the first to fully bring to light virtuoso Hungarian photographer André Kertész’s complicated story, poetic sensibility, and contradictory temperament. …Albers elucidates the elements that make Kertész’s work unique and influential in parallel with her fascinating perspective on photography’s rapid evolution. Ultimately recognized around the world for his genius, Kertész made art right up to his death at age 91 in 1985. Albers’ engrossing, surprising, and defining portrait brings Kertész and his work into exhilarating focus. — Booklist (starred review)
This biography tracks the triumphs and the travails of the twentieth-century Hungarian photographer André Kertész. Kertész’s compositions are notably strange … and many are reproduced here, enriched bythorough commentary by Albers. Her exploration of Kertész’s time as an infantryman in the First World War is especially illuminating, as she documents the curiously “flirtatious tender touch” with which he photographed his surroundings. This kind of artistic contradiction becomes a theme, as Albers unfurls details about Kertész’s romantic life, his move to America, and his later fame. — The New Yorker
André Kertész is the author of one of the most fascinating works of twentieth-century photography. In the streets of Budapest, Paris, and New York, he brought the art of poetic wandering to its highest point of incandescence. After eleven years of research, Patricia Albers delivers in a more than 500-page volume a precise account of this captivating love story between Kertész and Photography. Such a biography was long awaited. – Clément Chéroux, Director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation
With the lightest touch and the deepest research, Patricia Albers brings André Kertész back to life on every page of her remarkable book. … His deep complexity is revealed through Albers’s exquisite perception of André’s whole life, while we, gratefully, sit alongside watching in amazement. — Joel Meyerowitz, author of Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive
A wonderful biography of the man most responsible for inventing a life-embracing lyric photography so important to those who learned from him, including Henri Cartier-Bresson. Albers reveals Kertesz’s great gifts, his personal generosity and the soul-wrenching anger which colored his accomplishments. – Sandra Phillips, Curator Emerita of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
A photographer’s unique eye. Biographer, curator, and art historian Albers offers a comprehensive biography of the widely acclaimed photographer André Kertész …A well-researched life of an iconoclast.
— Kirkus Review
Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous! Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Patricia Albers’s Everything Is Photograph is that it is non-fiction. This fascinating, compelling, and incredibly moving biography of Hungarian photographer André Kertész reads like the best of novels … This is an inspiring read for anyone—a reminder of the power of persistence, and of art. — Meg Waite Clayton, author of Typewriter Beach
André Kertész transformed photography into an art form. Through his images—starting with his early years in Budapest, and then in Paris, and finally, late in life, leaning out of his balcony on Washington Square—frame by unforgettable frame, Kertész captured vanished worlds for us. Patricia Albers’ impressive book brings the master and his work back to vivid life. —Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story and The Chancellor
What a very real examination of my friend André’s life, so full of detail into a life well led. — Graham Nash, musicien and photographer
If we run with the idea that contemporary photography is a “language,” then Kertész is the one who invented the grammar. He is foundational to contemporary photography in the most fundamental of ways. … If you are a scholar of photography, a dedicated reader of biographies, or someone with a deep curiosity about the life behind one of the world’s greatest photographers, you will almost certainly find this book worth its sticker price.
– F-STOP Magazine
This first complete biography of the man many consider the father of modern photography is impressively researched and beautifully written. — Hadassah Magazine
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