Ata Kando

Ata Kandó born Etelka Görög; (17 September 1913 – 14 September 2017) was a Hungarian-born Dutch photographer. She began her photography practice in the 1930s with children’s photography. In 1932 she left for Paris with her first husband, the artist Gyula Kando, with whom she had three children. After the war, she joined the Magnum photo agency where she befriended Robert Capa. In Paris, Kandó also worked as a fashion photographer. In 1954 she married the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken and moved to Holland with him.

Kando first made her name with compassionate photographs of refugees fleeing their homeland during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Throughout their adolescence, her children acted as models for her famous story photo books. In the late sixties, Ata Kando went on several expeditions to South America to raise awareness of the genocide against aboriginal tribes in Amazonia.