City Lights and The Other Press present
A Book Launch Party for
Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész
by Patricia Albers
Published by The Other Press
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.
Patricia 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, including Squarecylinder, 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 the Biographers International Plutarch Award.
Gabrielle Selz is the award-winning author of Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis. Her previous book, Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction (W.W. Norton, 2014), received the best memoir of the year award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was listed as a best book of 2014 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, More Magazine, and The Rumpus, among other publications. Her fiction has appeared in Fiction Magazine and her art criticism in Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Art & Object, and Newsday. She is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction and is a Moth Story Slam Winner.
This event is made possible with support from the City Lights Foundation