In 1959, she won a silver medal in Munich for fashion photography and then in 1991, received the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal [hu]; this was followed in 1998 with the Imre Nagy Prize and that same year, she and her husband received the Righteous Among the Nations, awarded by Israel for saving Jews during the Holocaust.

[1] Kandó and her husband returned to Paris in 1938 and she opened a photography studio between the Louvre and the Palais Garnier with Ferenc Haár's wife.

[2] Primarily focusing on children's photography,[4] the business began growing, but in 1940 the German invasion of Paris forced the couple's deportation and return to Hungary.

[4] In 1947, the family returned to Paris and Kandó resumed her photography career with a camera she received from Robert Capa after her own was lost.

Shortly thereafter, Kandó and her husband separated and she fell in love with a 25-year-old Dutch photographer, Ed van der Elsken.

When the Bound Arts Federation (Dutch: Gebonden Kunsten Federatie (GKf)) supported the trip and De Bezige Bij agreed to publish the works, Violette Cornelius joined her.

[2][3] The following year, Kandó published a book called Droom in het woud (Dream in the forest), which featured the holiday trips she had taken in Switzerland and Austria with her children.

[citation needed] In 1961, through a fashion model, Barbara Brandlín, who was also working as an assistant to the architect Le Corbusier, Kandó was invited to visit Caracas.

She photographed Brandlín in[2] the jungle and through contact with a French priest was able to fly to the interior and take images of some of the native indigenous people.

The South American photographs were featured in National Geographic[2] and some images were purchased by the British Museum[1] and private collectors.

[7] In 1999, Kandó moved to the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom to be near one of her daughters and then in 2001 returned to the Netherlands, settling in Bergen.

The book, was originally planned to be named Ulysses, but was renamed in 2003 and published as Kalypso & Nausikaä – Foto's naar Homerus Odyssee.

[5] Two years later, Kandó held an exhibition of works in conjunction with the Hungarian Embassy in Berlin in 2006, which also featured were photographs taken in 1956 of refugee children.