Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész

Join author Patricia Albers in conversation with Lucy Gray on Albers’ latest book, Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész, the first full biography of the innovative “father of modern photography.” 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 14 years of 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. 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.

“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

About the Speakers

Patricia Albers is a San Francisco Bay Area–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 were 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, including 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 a juror for Biographers International Plutarch Award.

Lucy Gray is an art photographer whose work is collected in the Getty Museum, the deYoung Museum, The Legion of Honor Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. Her books include an artist’s edition of Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust” and “Balancing Acts: Three Prima Ballerinas Becoming Mothers.” Her essays have been printed in Elle, Interview, Brick, Alta and American Stage Magazine.

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