Book Review: ‘Everything Is Photograph,’ by Patricia Albers

Kertész was born Andor Kohn in 1894 in Budapest, to culturally assimilated Jews. From the time he picked up his first camera at 18, he was hooked. As a conscript in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I, he lugged a camera to the Eastern Front, fragile glass plates and all. His time in the army was terrifying, but it was also full of creative discovery; after the hostilities, his re-entry into a dull day job as a bank clerk felt all the more dreary and unbearable.

In the mid-1920s, Kertész moved to Paris, the city he would forever consider his artistic home. There, he dabbled in Surrealism, but he would ultimately become what Albers calls a “movement of one,” whose work was “untheorized and instinctual.” While other photographers emphasized grand solemnity, he preferred oblique angles and incongruous details. Brassaï admiringly called him “the bird catcher.”

Kertész started using a new portable camera called a Leica (now legendary among photojournalists) that let him move through the streets more nimbly. “It is no longer the camera that takes the picture,” his younger brother, Jeno, said, “but the lens that draws as you want it to.”

What Kertész wanted to draw he was never quite able to put into words. He struggled with French and, later, English. He even had trouble expressing himself in Hungarian. But his pictures were like poems, radiating a quiet intensity. Albers begins each chapter with a photo he took during the time period that follows. The chapter on his first years in Paris features an image of a tantalizing doorway to a mysterious staircase. Albers prefaces his move to America in 1936 with his close-up shot of a drooping tulip.

As Europe spiraled toward another war, Kertész was lucky to get a job offer from a press agency in the United States, even if he was grudging about his good fortune. He and his second wife, Elizabeth Salamon, moved to New York, where he took on commercial work and had a nicely remunerative 15-year run at House & Garden. But for a long time he had trouble getting recognition for the photography he wanted to do. His quiet, melancholy sensibility didn’t jibe with the showboating American vernacular. “You are too human, sorry, Kertész,” one editor supposedly told him. “Make it brutal.” Another editor confessed to being utterly baffled by Kertész’s pictures: “I don’t understand them.”

Of course, his fortunes would eventually turn. “Everything Is Photograph” — the title comes from Kertész’s explanation of how he chose his subjects — shows the decisive roles played by an artist’s personality and fickle gatekeepers. Kertész, too, continued taking pictures, even when advanced age and increased frailty meant spending less time shooting in the street and more time perched on his balcony or positioned by his window. This method of picture-taking suited him just fine. He “fishes for photographs,” a friend once said. “Instead of running to find them, he waits patiently for them to bite.”