Andor Kraszna-Krausz

Andor Kraszna-Krausz (12 January 1904 – 24 December 1989), born Andor Krausz, was a Hungarian publisher and writer of photographic literature; he founded Focal Press in 1938.

Career

Andor Krausz was born on 12 January 1904 in Szombathely, Hungary, to Adolf Krausz and Iren Krausz (née Rosenberge). After studying at the local Roman Catholic high school, he enrolled in the Technical Institute in Munich in 1922 and a year later moved to the School of Photography and Cinematography at Munich University. He edited Wilhelm Knapp's Filmtechnik after 1926, and lived in Germany until 1937, when he emigrated to the United Kingdom. As a student, he had become interested in publishing, but turned his hand to writing; by the late 1930s, he was an experienced writer on photography. After arriving in the United Kingdom, he began his own publishing house, Focal Press, which published its first books in 1938; one of those, W. D. Emanuel and F. L. Dash's The All-in-One Camera Book, would be reprinted in 81 editions. Thus began a series of books about the topic; he went on to publish 1,200 books on photography, cinematography and broadcasting, which sold 50 million copies.

Focal Press thereby "became world renown[ed] in the field". By the early 1940s, it also began publishing large-format picture books of nineteenth-century photography (such as Gallery of Immortal Portraits in 1940 and Victorian Photography in 1942), which Deac Rossell has argued "had a decisive impact on the revival of interest in nineteenth century photography"; a modernist, Kraszna-Krausz's belief in democratic values led him to praise Victorian photographers' amateur inventiveness and exploration of photography. Across his career, Kraszna-Krausz also developed a reputation for predicting technological change in photography, with The Times calling him a "prophet of the camera arts". His works were especially popular in Germany, where he won the German Society for Photography's Culture Award in 1979. In the United Kingdom, he received an honorary DLitt from the University of Bradford. In 1982, he established the Kraszna-Kraus Foundation, which continues to make annual awards to people whose book has made "original and lasting educational, professional, historical and cultural contributions to the field". He died on 24 December 1989.