Patricia Albers' "Everything Is Photograph"

Another book I’m reading this summer is Patricia Albers’ Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész (2026). I love the title. It comes from an interview Kertész gave in 1978. The interviewer asks him, “How do you decide what to photograph?” Kertész replies, “Everything is photograph.” 

Kertész was born in Budapest in 1894. He began photographing at age eighteen. It’s fascinating to watch his career evolve. Right from the start he had an eye for light and shadow. Albers says, “The use of shadows would become Andor’s poetic signature as a photographer.” She calls him a “poet-photographer.” Her descriptive analyses of his early pictures are excellent. Here, for example, she considers Bocskay-tér, Budapest: 

In one photograph Andor took, the square’s only lamp turns a section of the street into a starkly lit stage. A solitary man in an overcoat and hat, his model Jenő, hugs a wall as if in the opening scene of a Gothic melodrama, half merging with his doppelgänger shadow. 

It’s a miracle that he survives WWI. He’s conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army. He and his battalion march to Galicia, the most savage killing ground of the eastern front. Even in the chaos of army life, Kertész manages to take photos. Albers writes,

At some point during that trek, Andor took a picture. The top half of Forced March to the Front is inert sky. Below, a rope of soldiers coils over fenceless fields. Any army’s operations rely on subsuming individuals into the corps and reducing them all to sameness. The exception in Andor’s picture is one soldier who turns his head, shows his face, and thus reads as an individual. Andor’s self-assertion in taking the picture parallels that of the soldier. He too briefly breaks rank and exits the war-machine to act as a seeing and thinking individual. By selecting and recording the scene, he makes it his and not the army’s. For the fraction of a second it takes to expose his glass plate, he holds those hundreds of men back from the rush to oblivion.

He’s wounded in battle and taken to a Red Cross hospital where, after surgery, he eventually recovers. After that, he’s stationed in Esztergom, his regiment’s home base. While there, he spends hours tramping the surrounding hills, fields, and roads. Albers writes,

One Sunday he returned from Bátorkeszi (today Bátorove Kosihy), northeast of Esztergom, with a negative that could illustrate the opening scene of a nineteenth-century novel. There he had met a young notary, pastor, and schoolmaster standing around after church, bandying words and enjoying a smoke. Village men typically donned dark suits on the Sabbath. But those in Andor’s picture cut more worldly figures than most with their starched collars, watch chains, and self-possessed airs. The notary makes a graceful hand gesture. Like his offbeat felt hat, it suggests a bureaucrat with a bohemian soul. Andor’s picture cocoons him and his friends in an eternal Sunday afternoon, even as the European civilization they represent was shattering all around them.

The war grinds on. For two years, Kertész ricochets around Central and Eastern Europe, traveling mostly by military train. Whenever possible, he takes pictures. Albers writes,

Everything piqued Andor’s interest. 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. Turks, Russians, Romanians, Germans. Himself. In Albania, he took a self-portrait with a Muslim man and his three sons. Judging from the pictures, they were kindred spirits, though it’s unlikely that Andor had any language in common with the Albanians. The nationalism that was the root cause of the war was irrelevant. 

Kertész is in Budapest when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses. The city is in turmoil. Kertész has a job at a bank. Back to drudgery five days a week. Albers quotes him: “Being a photographer in Budapest was like being zero.” He continues to take pictures. But not of war or strife. That wasn’t his thing. As Albers says, “He had photographic interests and values that were distinctly his own.” On October 7, 1925, he boards a train for Paris: “His life swung open on the unknown.” 

In Paris, he hangs out at the Café du Dôme. He gets a job as a retoucher at a studio. He meets Man Ray. He meets Piet Mondrian. He takes a photo of Mondrian’s apartment. Albers writes,

The right side of André’s vertically bisected Chez Mondrian shows the stairwell landing outside the artist’s door. The light from an unseen window falls on the bannister, the stairs, the doormat, and the wall across the hall. The darker half of the photograph, to the left, includes Seuphor’s boater and a jacket hanging behind a table just inside the apartment. At the table’s edge sits a round vase with a painted wooden tulip. André probably moved that too. He knew that its shadow, when it was right, would bring his picture to life.

I’m only a third of the way through this delectable book. I’m at the point where Kertész takes The Stairs of Monmartre (1927) – one of my favorites. Albers tells me something about this superb picture that I didn’t know before – that it’s the second of two versions. Kertész wasn’t satisfied with the first one. He goes back for a second try. This time he has a new Hugo Meyer Satz Plasmat lens on his camera. Albers writes,

André’s second attempt at The Stairs of Montmartre resolved the scene into a remarkable image. In this version, a man sits on the bottom step, a woman approaches, and the viewer is left to imagine what will happen between them. They give the image a narrative tension. Formally, André has tightened the composition and, moving down two or three steps, shifted his viewpoint. More subtly, yet powerfully, his choice of lens distinguishes The Stairs of Montmartre.

She points out,

The Satz Plasmat warps the scene slightly. Although viewers may not consciously register that difference between André’s two versions of the staircase, most can sense it. In the second, the pitch of the stairs feels more acute. The cobblestones of the street beyond come up closer. The Satz Plasmat effects a subtly upturned space, conveying a feeling of which today’s colder lenses are incapable.

I relish such analyses. Everything Is Photograph abounds with them. I’m enjoying it enormously. 

André Kertész, The Stairs of Montmartre (1927)

Sybille Bedford's Delightful "A Visit to Don Otavio"

My beach book this summer is Sybille Bedford’s 1953 travelogue A Visit to Don Otavio. I’m about half way through it. I’m enjoying every delicious word. Bedford is a great writer – where greatness means vivid, specific, original, lucid, sensual, perceptive, witty, lively, and idiosyncratic. The book is an account of her travels in Mexico in the mid-1940s. She’s accompanied by her friend Esther Murphy Arthur, whom she refers to simply as E. The two of them manage to get themselves in and out of dozens of bizarre situations. Here, for example, they’re on a bus to Lake Pátzcuaro:

A well-grown sow lies heaving in the aisle. My neighbor has a live turkey hen on her lap and the bird simply cannot help it, she must partly sit on my lap too. This is very hot. Also she keeps fluffing out her surprisingly harsh feathers. From time to time, probably to ease her own discomfort, the bird stands up. Supported on six pointed claws, one set of them on my knee, she digs her weight into us and shakes herself. Dust and lice emerge. On my other side, in the aisle, stands a little boy with a rod on which dangles a dead, though no doubt freshly caught, fish. With every lurch of the conveyance, and it is all lurches, the fish, moist but not cool, touches my arm and sometimes my averted cheek. E. has found a seat in the back where, she being of the build of Don Quixote, her knees touch her chin. On one of her feet sits a little old man, obviously very tight. He has a stone crock standing next to him on the floor, which from time to time he lifts to his lips, an operation which pervades the entire vehicle with strong alcoholic vapors. Sometimes he bumps the crock back on to the floor, and sometimes on E.’s free foot. She winces and twitches, but hasn’t got the room to extricate herself. He seems a kind old man. He crawls out at the stops and returns with the crown of his hat dripping with muddy water which he takes around to the children on the bus to drink, and when poor E. lets out a small squeak of pain as the crock is once more slammed down on her exposed foot, the old man with an angelic smile lifts it and presses it against her mouth. She takes a polite gulp. It was very strong, she said afterwards, and quite sweet. Then the old fellow scrambled up, tumbled over the sow, hugged the driver and began addressing the air. He was making rather a nuisance of himself. Nobody paid the slightest attention. Then two men got up, seized him, opened the door of the moving bus and with the driver stepping on the gas hurled the old man out into the road. Someone threw the crock after him; everybody craned to get a receding glimpse of a man lying bent double in a pool of blood. Then the whole bus burst into laughter.

Note that “Also she keeps fluffing out her surprisingly harsh feathers.” Bedford is a superb describer with an acute sense of the absurd. A Visit to Don Otavio brims with her quirky observations. I’m enjoying it immensely. 

Hlynur Pálmason’s Brilliant "The Love That Remains"

Last night I watched Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains (2025). What a strange, brilliant film! I can tell you immediately why I like it – the combination of landscape art and deep-sea fishing. It’s about a family breakup. Anna is a sculptor and visual artist. Magnús is a fisherman who works on a trawler. They have three children and a dog named Panda. They live in rural Iceland, near the coast. The setting is breathtakingly beautiful. Pálmason shows it magnificently. Magnús no longer lives with the family, but he visits periodically. He struggles to accept the separation. There are passages of absolute realism – Anna working on her art, Magnús on the trawler – which I devoured. And there are surreal scenes, e.g., a knight-helmeted sculpture that comes to life, a giant rooster that attacks Magnús while he’s sleeping – that I could do without. But overall, I loved this movie. It brims with inspired details. The Icelandic light is exquisite! 

Zurbarán

I love still life. One of the earliest (and best) is Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose (1633). Nicola Jennings writes about it in the July 23 London Review of Books:

One of the highlights of the exhibition for many will be the room of still lifes by Zurbarán and his son Juan. As the excellent wall texts explain, their contribution to the genre was significant. One of the curators’ coups has been to secure Zurbarán’s only signed and dated still life, the Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633), from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The objects appear side by side, but separate from one another, on a wooden surface. The uncluttered and balanced composition creates a sense of stillness unmatched by most other artists of the period. It is comparable only to the still lifes of Juan Sánchez Cotán, who in 1604 took vows at the charterhouse of Granada. Both artists infuse their work with a spiritual charge, exemplified in the Pasadena painting by the cup of water and the rose, symbols of the Virgin Mary.

That last sentence directs my attention to an aspect of Zurbarán’s picture that I hadn’t previously appreciated – the symbolism of the cup of water and the rose. I’ve always focused on the lemons – actually citrons, as Peter Schjeldahl points out in his wonderful “Bearing Fruit” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2009). Schjeldahl was beguiled by them. He called them a “touchstone of painterly potency.” I agree. The way Zurbarán re-creates their nubbly yellow skins in paint is amazing. They're so real looking, I want to reach in and pick one off the plate.

Queen Anne's Lace

August 4, 2026, Gulf Shore Way, just beyond Stanhope Campground in Prince Edward Island National Park, on my way to Dalvay-by-the-Sea, I took this photo. Rippling green marram grass woven with Queen Anne’s lace. Old wooden snow fence running through it. Blue-green of rolling Gulf of St. Lawrence. Wave breaking on beach. White foam. Pale blue sky. Touch of white cloud. 

A Note on My Title

I stole my blog title from Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention (1972), a study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry. Gilbert’s title derives from a sentence in Lawrence’s preface to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun (1936):

The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and “discovers” a new world within the known world.

A poem can be an act of attention, so can an essay, a painting, a photograph, a movie. Great writers and artists make a real effort of attention.