Overview
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. 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, Andre Kertesz soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through 15 years 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 Kertesz'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 Kertesz from the Eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively central European diaspora. From Conde Nast's postwar media empire to the ""photo boom"" of the 1970s. She revisits Kertesz's relationships with other photographers, among them his ""frenemy"" Brassai and protege 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, Kertesz'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.
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…Albers’s engrossing, surprising, and defining portrait brings Kertész and his work into exhilarating focus.” —Booklist (starred review) “A comprehensive biography of the widely acclaimed photographer…A well-researched life of an iconoclast.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Kertész] is foundational to contemporary photography in the most fundamental of ways. Patricia Albers, a prominent California-based art historian, has released a new and quite definitive biography…Albers spends real time contextualizing Kertész’s artistic development…giving the reader a fuller sense of how his sensibility was shaped and reshaped across continents…insightful.” —F-Stop Magazine “With the lightest touch and the deepest research, Patricia Albers brings André Kertész back to life on every page of her remarkable book. In no small measure, it’s thanks to young André’s daily diary entries throughout his life that we hear his voice so clearly. We feel his boyish passions, follow his discovery of the camera, and watch as he invents the intimate, personal form of twentieth-century photography. We see him as a lovesick boy adoring the girl across the way, having playful visual adventures with his brother, we go off to war with him as a young soldier, feel his struggles in Budapest, move with him to Paris, sit with him among the great artists at the Café du Dôme, see him find success, flee the Nazis, and live in New York. There he lives unhappily, works, loves, fails, succeeds, and always hungers for something he already has. 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
“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…Albers’s engrossing, surprising, and defining portrait brings Kertész and his work into exhilarating focus.” —Booklist (starred review) “A comprehensive biography of the widely acclaimed photographer…A well-researched life of an iconoclast.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Kertész] is foundational to contemporary photography in the most fundamental of ways. Patricia Albers, a prominent California-based art historian, has released a new and quite definitive biography…Albers spends real time contextualizing Kertész’s artistic development…giving the reader a fuller sense of how his sensibility was shaped and reshaped across continents…insightful.” —F-Stop Magazine “Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous! Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Patricia Albers’s Everything Is Photograph is that it is nonfiction. This fascinating, compelling, and incredibly moving biography of Hungarian photographer André Kertész reads like the best of novels, taking us from the streets of his native Budapest to tables of great artists at the Café du Dôme in Paris to Kertész’s memorable view over New York’s Washington Square Park and some of the world’s most beautifully haunting photographs. We experience Kertész’s boyhood obsession with the camera, his complicated loves, his struggle to find a place for himself and his art in the world, and the constant love of a brother who helps him find it. This is an inspiring read for anyone—a reminder of the power of persistence, and of art.” —Meg Waite Clayton, author of Typewriter Beach and The Postmistress of Paris “With the lightest touch and the deepest research, Patricia Albers brings André Kertész back to life on every page of her remarkable book. In no small measure, it’s thanks to young André’s daily diary entries throughout his life that we hear his voice so clearly. We feel his boyish passions, follow his discovery of the camera, and watch as he invents the intimate, personal form of twentieth-century photography. We see him as a lovesick boy adoring the girl across the way, having playful visual adventures with his brother, we go off to war with him as a young soldier, feel his struggles in Budapest, move with him to Paris, sit with him among the great artists at the Café du Dôme, see him find success, flee the Nazis, and live in New York. There he lives unhappily, works, loves, fails, succeeds, and always hungers for something he already has. 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
Praise for Joan Mitchell: “Patricia Albers has written a book about Mitchell that I cannot imagine will ever be improved upon, so graceful and incisive is her account of the artist’s hellbent life and lyric art.” —New York Times “Like Mitchell’s vast canvases, Albers’s impressive book ought to be experienced in the morning, ‘for it can animate the entire day.’” —The New Yorker
Author Information
Patricia Albers is a California-based writer, editor, and art historian. She is the author of Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter- A Life, the acclaimed first biography of the abstract painter. Her previous books include Shadows, Fire, Snow- The Life of Tina Modotti and Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance. Albers's essays, art reviews, and features have appeared in numerous museum catalogs and publications.
