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“Superlative arts biographer Albers…is the first to fully bring to light virtuoso Hungarian photographer André Kertész’s complicated story, poetic sensibility, and contradictory temperament…Albers elucidates the elements that make Kertész’s work unique and influential in parallel with her fascinating perspective on photography’s rapid evolution…Albers’s engrossing, surprising, and defining portrait brings Kertész and his work into exhilarating focus.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A comprehensive biography of the widely acclaimed photographer…A well-researched life of an iconoclast.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Kertész] is foundational to contemporary photography in the most fundamental of ways. Patricia Albers, a prominent California-based art historian, has released a new and quite definitive biography…Albers spends real time contextualizing Kertész’s artistic development…giving the reader a fuller sense of how his sensibility was shaped and reshaped across continents…insightful.” —F-Stop Magazine
“With the lightest touch and the deepest research, Patricia Albers brings André Kertész back to life on every page of her remarkable book. In no small measure, it’s thanks to young André’s daily diary entries throughout his life that we hear his voice so clearly. We feel his boyish passions, follow his discovery of the camera, and watch as he invents the intimate, personal form of twentieth-century photography. We see him as a lovesick boy adoring the girl across the way, having playful visual adventures with his brother, we go off to war with him as a young soldier, feel his struggles in Budapest, move with him to Paris, sit with him among the great artists at the Café du Dôme, see him find success, flee the Nazis, and live in New York. There he lives unhappily, works, loves, fails, succeeds, and always hungers for something he already has. His deep complexity is revealed through Albers’s exquisite perception of André’s whole life, while we, gratefully, sit alongside watching in amazement.” —Joel Meyerowitz, author of Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive