Everything Is Photograph

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 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 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 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.“[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 FoundationPatricia 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.Introduction

Self-Portrait, Paris is conjured from practically nothing: parts of a door and a wall, the shadow of the photographer gripping the tripod attached to his camera. A shadow within a shadow, actually, because of the two light sources, one yielding an ordinary profile, the other, an oafish umbra. Tucked into the picture’s upper-left corner is the only material object: the box lock on the door. The lock resembles a camera, with its covered keyhole as the lens, complete with focusing ring. What’s behind that keyhole? The image offers no clues. Self-Portrait, Paris is a scene from a shadow play. A meditation on photography, seeing, and self. A nod to the negative-positive process, described by one of its inventors as “the art of fixing a shadow.”
Behind the real camera that winter night in 1927 stood a tall, scrawny, thirty-two-year-old transplant to Paris. André Kertész had arrived from his native Hungary sixteen months earlier on a train ticket purchased with a loan from a cousin. Paris represented his best hope to establish himself as a photographer. Whatever that meant. Photographers made their living from studio portraiture, newspaper work, or commercial jobs like supplying pictures for postcards. All that bored André. He wanted a more direct contact with life. But he did need to eat.
He spoke little French, nor did he believe he could learn. He had no savings. Often he skipped meals or made do with bread, butter, and milk, tallying his purchases each night before bed. A baguette cost the equivalent of a nickel, a bottle of milk and cube of butter, fourteen cents. His eyes were irritated. He couldn’t sleep through the night, typically only two or three hours. Come afternoon, he might doze off on a park bench. In letters postmarked Budapest, André’s family and friends were pleading with him to forget France and come home. As for his Hungarian girlfriend — if she still was his girlfriend — she had ordered him not to come home until he made a success of his life. In the eight years since the Great War ended, he had struggled to square his passion for photography with the pressure he felt to achieve worldly success. Yet he’d left Hungary still “a nobody” in his estimation and hers.
From his first hours in Paris, André had drifted through its parks and streets, brimming with inquisitive wonder about this city he was interpreting with his Goerz Tenax, a favorite camera — his companion, his accomplice, almost his double. Locals tended to scurry by this lost-looking foreigner. But a bevy of friends eased his isolation. Nearly all were Paris-savvy émigré artists centered in Montparnasse, mostly Hungarians. André lingered in their studios, admired their art, showed up at their parties. He would photograph, later giving prints to each of his friends. As they arranged themselves for a group picture — some laughing, some draping an arm on a friend’s shoulder, one clutching a violin, another a bottle — André would position his camera on a tripod and set the timer, then dash in to include himself, affable, bright-eyed, and grinning.
Most of his days included a stop at the Hungarian table on the terrace of the Café du Dôme, where every free spirit in Paris landed sooner or later. There his pals introduced him around and started a buzz about his unorthodox portraits, still lifes, and urban scenes, which they passed hand to hand. That had brought André a scattering of commissions. Publicity shots for the string quartet led by his friend Feri Roth. Pictures of the Montmartre villa that the Viennese architect Adolf Loos was building for the Dada poet Tristan Tzara. Portraits of a doctor, a dancer, a bibliophile.
The trickle of income had allowed him to rent the seventh-floor walk-up on the rue de Vanves (today the rue Raymond Losserand) in the fourteenth arrondissement, where he took Self-Portrait, Paris. A maid’s room the size of a small storage space, it had no kitchen, bathroom, or heat. No one would describe the place as charming, even though André would fix it up with pictures, shelves, and linens sent by his mother. He was installing a darkroom. After sixteen months of lugging his belongings from one threadbare hotel or makeshift bedroom to another, borrowing or improvising workspace, his garret represented a victory. He had a door with a lock and a dormer window. He had an aerie. Almost a home. A French home.

Born in Budapest in 1894, André began photographing at age eighteen. From the start, he did what others did not. When portraiture meant stiff formal poses, he snapped pictures of Roma children cavorting, his relatives schmoozing, and himself racing, jumping, or swimming with his brothers. When photo reporters were taking head shots of politicians, he — by then, the lead photographer for France’s most visually audacious magazine — zeroed in on billboards, marionettes, and a fortune teller reflected in her crystal ball. When razor-sharp prints of grandiose landscapes were winning applause, he concentrated on views of waterfronts, park benches, and vacant lots, all slightly grainy. In a century when the photography world revolved around war, social upheaval, outsize personalities, and fashion, he kept his eyes on the commonplace. All his life, André swam against strong tides, claiming the right to photograph as he pleased.
As well as André’s subjects, his ideas about what photographers could do were unorthodox. He conceived of the portrait in absence, a still life selected and arranged to express the animating spirit of the objects’ owner. He took some two hundred pictures of female nudes reflected in funhouse mirrors, pictures that so disconcerted even his admirers that the work did not receive a solo exhibition until half a century later. And he was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica, the camera now mythically linked to street photography. The practice of prowling the city in a state of heightened visual sensitivity had been around since the nineteenth century, but it took André and his Leica to make it dynamic and modern.
All the while, photography was radically changing. The improved photomechanical technology of the 1920s allowed the expanding European picture press to deliver images straight to the masses. Shifting the spotlight from the photograph as an object seen by a relative few to the photograph as a reproduction embedded in text and seen by hundreds of thousands transformed the medium into a driving social and cultural force. André was there, pioneering subjective photojournalism and delivering what was arguably the world’s first great photo essay.
Insisting that he was an “eternal amateur” (read: he would always work as he pleased), André lived and breathed photography for seventy-three years. Even in old age, he stayed curious and inventive, handling light with nimbleness, skill, and joy.
“Whatever we have done,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once declared on behalf of himself and other photographers, “Kertész did first.” When the two met, Cartier-Bresson would jokingly fall to his knees, hold out his Leica, and beg for a blessing. He was not alone in following André’s lead. André coaxed Brassaï into picking up his first camera and taught him how to shoot pictures at night. Robert Capa owed André an even more elemental debt: The older photographer fed the irrepressible youth, gave him a bed when he couldn’t afford a hotel, and tutored him in the basics of photojournalism. The German photographer Marianne Breslauer drew inspiration from André’s photographs of pedestrians and shadows, the British Bill Brandt, from his distorted nudes. In the 1940s, the young Robert Frank emulated André’s agility with the Leica and even poached one of his favorite subjects: Parisian park chairs. Speaking in 1952, the French photographer Willy Ronis declared himself “open-mouthed with admiration” at André’s pictures. Robert Doisneau dubbed him “the Master.” In the 1960s, Hiroji Kubota and Sylvia Plachy joined the ranks of his protégés. The list goes on: The currents of modernism delivered the practices of André Kertész to photographers far and wide.
So it’s startling that his name, unlike those of some he helped and inspired, has faded from public awareness. During the eleven years I was researching and writing this book, my references to André Kertész to people around me most often drew blank looks or questions about how to pronounce his last name. (It’s Kertess.)
Even cultural historians are apt to overlook this photographer’s photographer. “Make a list of the major American photographers,” proposes Ross Wetzsteon in his intellectual history of Greenwich Village, “and compare it to the list of photographers who have lived in the Village: Mathew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus.” Nary a mention of André, a naturalized American. Yet André lived in, loved, and photographed the Village for more than three decades. His lyrical images of a snow-blanketed Washington Square count among his signature works.
A gentle and generous man with an unassuming manner, André was endowed with Old World charm and a roguish sense of humor. Yet he lacked the career-propelling joie de vivre of the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, the social instincts of Brassaï, the intellectual sophistication of Walker Evans, and the charisma of Robert Capa. Because he never mastered English or French, conversations with him tended to bog down under his interlocutor’s strain to understand what he was saying.
Moreover, outraged and aggrieved by the lack of recognition during his first decades in the United States (he moved to New York in 1936), André never let anyone forget how badly he believed he’d been treated. Even though Americans made him rich and famous in the end, he couldn’t get the taste of rejection out of his mouth. “Honors Heap on Bitter André Kertész, Decries Lack of Praise,” announced a 1980 United Press International dispatch about the latest shower of awards on the eighty-six-year-old. “Given his accomplishments, one would assume Kertész would be content,” comments the reporter. Kertész was not. He took advantage of that interview, and many others, to spew invective at Americans. “Oh, what an irritating man André Kertész was!” shuddered his friend the New Yorker writer Brendan Gill.
A bookworm since childhood and a secular Jew, André may or may not have read the memoirs of the Vienna-born Nazi death camp survivor Jean Améry. If not, he should have. Resentment, writes Améry, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.”