Everything Is Photograph

“[A] judicious new biography of an artist who spent most of his extremely long life feeling like he never properly got his due…Everything Is Photograph is filled with [Albers’s] gorgeous descriptions of Kertész’s pictures, tempting you to interrupt your reading to Google every photo she writes about with such acuity and care. But the life she recounts is fascinating, too.” —New York Times

“This biography tracks the triumphs and the travails of the twentieth-century Hungarian photographer…Kertész’s compositions are notably strange…and many are reproduced here, enriched by thorough commentary by Albers…illuminating.” —The New Yorker

“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

“What a very real examination of my friend André’s life, so full of detail into a life well led.” —Graham Nash

“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

“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

“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

“This is 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 Kertész’s great gifts, his personal generosity, and the soul-wrenching anger which colored his accomplishments.” —Sandra S. Phillips, Curator Emerita of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

“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 five-hundred-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