Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész

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, Andr Kert sz soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through 14 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 Kert sz'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 Kert sz from the Eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively Central European diaspora. From Cond Nast's postwar media empire to the "photo boom" of the 1970s. She revisits Kert sz's relationships with other photographers, among them his frenemy Brassa and prot g 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. Freshly seen, formally vigorous, emotionally rich, and aesthetically charged, Kert sz's images speak of the medium as a tool for human connection, inquiry about the world, self-narration, and self-invention, even as they project its mysteries.