EVERYTHING IS PHOTOGRAPH

A photographer’s unique eye.

Biographer, curator, and art historian Albers offers a comprehensive biography of the widely acclaimed photographer André Kertész (1894-1985). Born in Budapest, Kertész started photographing at age 18 and never was without a camera, even as a soldier during World War I. Everything piqued his interest, Albers writes. “He photographed farmhouses, a kid smoking a cigar butt, a concert on a ship, trees and streams, a makeshift market set up among ruins, soldiers relieving themselves in a ditch, street cleaners, a sandal maker, and burned-out boxcars.” His reputation rose in the late 1920s, when photojournalists and reportage transformed photographic culture. Among the many cameras that he used during a long career, the lightweight Leica proved liberating, allowing him to take one photo after another and to develop the film into contact sheets rather than more laboriously as single images. Albers chronicles the highs and lows of his career, as well as the tangles of his personal life. In 1928, he married Rózsi Klein but betrayed her to resume an affair with an early love, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1933, although not legally divorced from Rózsi. He and Elizabeth emigrated to New York, where he found himself faced with commercial work and fashion photography, neither of which interested him. For 14 years, he worked, unhappily, for House & Garden, producing more than 3,000 images. Albers portrays Kertész as curmudgeonly and self-aggrandizing. His “self-image as a victim of cheating and exploitation became central to his understanding of his American years,” the author writes. “He misinterpreted people’s actions, misread benign comments as hostile, and suspected slights where none were intended.” Yet he was lauded by his contemporaries and honored in exhibitions internationally, including a retrospective at MoMA.

A well-researched life of an iconoclast.