PrairieLights – Patricia Albers in conv with Garth Greenwell, Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész

Patricia Albers will read from her new biography, Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész, and will be joined in conversation with Garth Greenwell. Described as “The first full biography of the innovative ‘father of modern photography’ [which] vividly depicts his life and works, from Hungary to France and America, across the 20th century,” Everything Is Photograph is praised by the New York Times, which says: “Everything Is Photograph is filled with [Albers’s] gorgeous descriptions of Kertész’s pictures, tempting you to interrupt your reading to Google every photo she writes about with such acuity and care. But the life she recounts is fascinating, too.”

Patricia Albers is a San Francisco Bay Area–based writer, editor, and art historian (not to be confused with the anthropologist Patricia C. Albers). She is the author of Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life, the acclaimed first biography of the abstract painter. Her previous books were Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti and Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance. Using photographs discovered during her research about Modotti, Albers co-organized the exhibition “Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance,” shown at European museums and at the Rencontres d’Arles and garnering wide coverage in the European media, including a front-page story in Le Monde hailing it as “the first great [Modotti] exhibition in France.” Albers’s essays, art reviews, and features have appeared in numerous museum catalogs and publications, including 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 Biographers International Plutarch Award. She is also an instructor emerita of art history at San Jose State University. Her research and writing of Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész was supported by a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation (https://patriciaalbers.net/about).

Garth Greenwell is the author of three books of fiction, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for several awards, including the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. It was named a Best Book of 2020 by The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, and over thirty other publications. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages.