Ata Kandó, Hungarian Photographer, Dies at 103 in Netherlands

Hungarian photographer Ata Kandó died in Bergen, Netherlands, at age 103, three days before the news was announced. Born Etelka Görög in Budapest in 1913 to a Jewish family, she showed early interest in art and studied drawing at the Budapest Academy alongside Victor Vasarely and Gyula Kandó, whom she married in 1931. The couple moved to Paris, where Ata took up photography and opened a studio near the Louvre in 1938. During World War II, they fled Nazi-occupied Paris to Budapest, hiding dozens of Jews in their home; for this, they were named Righteous Among the Nations by Israel in 1998. After the war, she returned to Paris and was hired by Robert Capa at Magnum. She worked as a fashion photographer for major magazines while pursuing personal projects. In 1954, she created the series "Dream in the Forest" in the Alps, published as a book in 1957. Her most famous work is the "Red Book," a collection of black-and-white images from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, focusing on children affected by the violence. Success continued in the 1960s with photographs of South American Indian tribes. Later recognition included an exhibition of the Red Book in Amsterdam and at the Hungarian Embassy in Berlin for her 90th birthday, and a major retrospective at the Netherlands Photo Museum in Rotterdam in 2014.