Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész
Shadows of a man holding a camera on a tripod in front of a door. A man’s face, half-hidden behind a row of four plaster life masks: two photos that frame the comprehensive biography of one of the most influential photographic artists and photojournalists of the 1920s and beyond—André Kertész, who was lauded by the pioneer of candid street photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson, as a pathfinder: “Whatever we have done, Kertész has done first.”
Each chapter of Everything Is Photograph leads with a Kertész photograph to set time and place. Sleeping Boy from 1912 recalls 15-year-old Kertész and his infatuation with Jolán Balog. Forced March to the Front follows the teen to the trenches of WW1 three years later. Other photos trace his path from postwar Hungary to Paris and later New York, describe his early jobs and his relationship with wife Elizabeth, and highlight some of his most stunning photographic creations—a view of the courtyard in front of the French Academy as seen through the hands and numbers of its clock, a still life of a drooping “melancholic” tulip.
Within Kertész’s life story, author Albers melds anecdotes, interviews, backstory history, praise for his work and outright rejections. The picture emerges slowly, exposing negatives and developing images of the mind and heart of a man as he finds his own, unique artistic eye.
