A comprehensive new biography titled "Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész" by Patricia Albers offers the first complete portrait of the legendary photographer André Kertész (1894-1985), whose groundbreaking work blended Hungarian sensitivity with Parisian modernism and married Parisian poetry with New York brutality. When he died in 1985, this "poet photographer" left behind seventy-three years of photography comprising approximately 100,000 images that serve as witnesses to a rare communion with places and people.
Kertész's work is not only often enigmatic and moving but also formally unprecedented in its innovation. As renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson acknowledged, "Everything we have done, Kertész did before us." Born in Budapest in 1894, André Kertész achieved fame in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, fell into poverty and obscurity during the war years in New York, worked for fourteen years for House & Garden magazine, then unexpectedly returned to prominence with a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1964.
By the time of his death in 1985, Kertész had exhibited worldwide, created more than 100,000 photographs, and steered photography toward new and essential paths. He was the first major photographer to adopt the Leica camera, now mythically associated with street photography, and he pioneered subjective photojournalism by publishing what is arguably the world's first major photographic reportage. From the age of eighteen, when he first picked up a camera, Kertész overflowed with unconventional ideas about photography's potential.
Kertész conceived the portrait through absence, creating still lifes chosen and arranged to express the spirit that animated the owner of the objects. Collaborating with the French avant-garde weekly Vu and innovative German press magazines of the 1920s, he pioneered subjective photojournalism and explored optical distortions caused by water, headlights, and funhouse mirrors. At over 80 years old, he turned to Polaroid photography to create still lifes as a way of expressing his grief after losing his wife.
In a century where photography was dominated by war, social upheaval, extraordinary personalities, and fashion, this self-proclaimed amateur kept his gaze on what mattered to him personally. Authors who have written about Kertész's life and work have often focused on his Hungarian, French, or American periods separately. Some have succumbed to his assertion that photographs alone tell the definitive story of his life and work. The intimate character of Kertész's images, along with photography's inherent reality, supports this idea.
However, his work is highly selective in what he photographed, the negatives he printed, and the prints that have survived to this day. Moreover, these images simultaneously transcribe real and artificial constructions, revealing and concealing at the same time. Drawing on dozens of interviews, previous academic work, extensive archival research, and interrogating the images themselves, author Patricia Albers unearths aspects of Kertész's life that both he and his photographs obscured.
These hidden aspects include the trials of trench warfare, the impact of the Holocaust, and the story of his complex love affairs. Albers follows Kertész and his cameras from the Eastern Front during World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a dynamic Central European diaspora. She traces his journey through Condé Nast's postwar media empire to the rise of photography in the 1970s.
The biography revisits Kertész's relationships with other photographers, notably his friend-enemy Brassaï and his protégé, his "little boy" Robert Capa. Albers brings to life a man who was gentle, generous, and modest, endowed with old-world charm, but also consumed by resentment and rage, and prone to deception. "Everything is Photograph" immerses readers in the golden age of a photography that has now disappeared and in the life of an unparalleled interpreter of the world around him.
With striking freshness, great formal vigor, emotional richness, and intense aesthetics, Kertész's images reveal the medium as a tool for human connection, world exploration, self-narrative, and self-creation, while projecting its mysteries. According to legendary curator Jean-Claude Lemagny, "We are beginning to suspect that piercing Kertész's elusive secret would amount to piercing the very secret of photography itself."
Patricia Albers, a writer, photographer, and longtime admirer of Kertész, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa and a Master's degree in French literature from Middlebury College. Her first book, "Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti," was based on her discovery of Modotti photographs in an Oregon attic and led to a Modotti exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her book "Lady Painter: A Life of Joan Mitchell" was published by Knopf in May 2011.
Albers is a California-based writer, editor, and art historian who authored the critically acclaimed first biography of abstract painter Joan Mitchell. Her previous works include "Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti" and "Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance." Her essays, art criticism, and articles have appeared in numerous museum catalogs and publications, including SquareCylinder, San Francisco Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, and The New York Times. She has served on juries for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Plutarch Award of the International Association of Biographers. "Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész" is published by Other Press as a hardcover with ISBN 978-1-59051-509-9, with a publication date of January 27, 2026, and priced at $39.99.
