A comprehensive new biography titled "Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész" by Patricia Albers offers the first complete examination of the canonical photographer André Kertész (1894-1985), whose groundbreaking work uniquely blended Hungarian sensibilities with Parisian modernism and merged the poetry of Paris with the gritty reality of New York. The book explores the life of a photographer who left behind 73 years worth of photographs—approximately 100,000 images—representing what the author describes as "vestiges of a rare communion with places and people."
Kertész's influence on photography cannot be overstated, with renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson acknowledging, "Whatever we have done, Kertész did first." Born in Budapest in 1894, Kertész experienced a remarkable career trajectory that saw him rise to star status in Jazz Age Paris, fall into poverty and obscurity during wartime in New York, struggle through 14 years of commercial work shooting for House & Garden magazine, and then improbably reemerge into the international spotlight with a 1964 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The photographer's innovations fundamentally changed the medium in several crucial ways. He was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica camera, which became mythically linked to street photography, and he pioneered subjective photojournalism by publishing what many consider the world's first great photo essay. From the moment he first picked up a camera at age 18, Kertész was filled with unorthodox ideas about photography's potential, including his concept of "the portrait in absence"—still life images carefully selected and arranged to express the animating spirit of their owner.
Working for the French avant-garde weekly Vu and Germany's innovative mass media magazines of the 1920s, Kertész explored optical distortions created by water, headlights, and funhouse mirrors, pushing the boundaries of what photography could achieve. Even as an octogenarian, he continued innovating, turning to Polaroid photography to create still lifes as a way of processing his grief following the loss of his wife.
Albers' biography takes a more comprehensive approach than previous works about Kertész, which often focused narrowly on his Hungarian, French, or American periods. Many earlier writers fell into the trap of accepting Kertész's own insistence that his photographs alone told the definitive story of his life and work. While the diaristic quality of his images and photography's inherent factuality lend weight to this idea, Albers points out that these images are highly selective—representing only what he chose to photograph, which negatives he decided to print, and which prints ultimately survived.
Drawing on dozens of interviews, extensive previous scholarship, and deep archival research, Albers retrieves aspects of Kertész's life that both he and his pictures glossed over. These hidden elements include the ordeals he endured during trench warfare in World War I, the profound impact of the Holocaust on his life and worldview, and the complex tale of his tangled romantic relationships. The biography follows Kertész and his cameras from the Eastern Front during World War I to the vibrant artistic community of Paris, where he encountered figures like Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively Central European diaspora.
The book also examines Kertész's journey through Condé Nast's postwar media empire and the photo boom of the 1970s, while revisiting his complex relationships with other photographers. These included his complicated friendship with Brassaï, whom Albers describes as his "frenemy," and his mentorship of Robert Capa, whom Kertész affectionately called his "little child." Through meticulous research, Albers brings to life a man who was simultaneously gentle, generous, and unassuming, endowed with Old-World charm, yet also capable of harboring grievances and rage, and occasionally inclined toward deception.
In a century when photography often revolved around war, social upheaval, outsized personalities, and fashion, this self-declared amateur kept his focus on what truly mattered to him personally. His images, described as "freshly seen, formally vigorous, emotionally rich, and aesthetically charged," demonstrate photography's power as a tool for human connection, inquiry about the world, self-narration, and self-invention, while simultaneously projecting the medium's inherent mysteries.
As legendary curator Jean-Claude Lemagny observed, "We begin to suspect that to grasp Kertész's ungraspable secret would be to grasp the very secret of photography." Albers' comprehensive biography promises to immerse readers in the heyday of a now-lost version of photography through the life of one of its most consummate interpreters.
Patricia Albers, a California-based writer, editor, and art historian, brings significant expertise to this project. She holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of Iowa and an MA in French literature from Middlebury College. Her previous biographical work includes "Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti," which 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. She is also the author of "Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life," the acclaimed first biography of the abstract painter, as well as "Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance."
Albers has contributed essays, art reviews, and features to numerous museum catalogs and publications, including SquareCylinder, San Francisco Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, and the New York Times. She has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities and as a juror for the Biographers International Plutarch Award. "Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész" will be published by Other Press as a hardcover edition with ISBN 978-1-59051-509-9, scheduled for release on January 27, 2026, with a retail price of $39.99.
