Martin Munkácsi (1896 – 1963)
First exhibition of the new House of Photography at Deichtorhallen
Hamburg
The show „Martin Munkácsi: Think while you shoot” saves from oblivion a photographer who, as co-founder of modern photo journalism and fashion photography, had an inestimable influence on 20th century photography in Europe and America.
Without a doubt, Munkácsi, a Hungarian born in 1896, was one of the 20th century’s most important photographers. He shaped the face of modern photojournalism during the early 1920s while still in his home city of Budapest, and from 1928 to 1934 in Germany, bringing life to photography, which until then had been a static medium. As a sport photographer he is still unequalled.
He created countless cover images and an even greater number of eye-catching reportages and brilliant photo-essays for the legendary „Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung”, which back then already achieved a circulation of more than one million copies. And in mterms of formal composition his work remains exemplary to this very day. Henceforth, his pictures also appeared regularly in the reputed fashion magazine „Die Dame” as well as in other German and foreign magazines. Shortly prior to emigrating, on March 21, 1933 he covered the „Day of Potsdam”, that fateful moment when aging President Paul von Hindenburg handed over the country’s helm to Adolf Hitler. Then still under the aegis of Jewish editor-in-chief Kurt Korff, the „BIZ” („Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung“) published a special issue to mark the occasion.
Two months later the publishing house was aryanized, Martin Munkácsi left Germany and, like many other prominent editors and photographers went into emigration.
After his emigration, at the beginning of the 1930s he revolutionized fashion hotography in the United States, and his impact here was to be felt well after the end of his active career. He received his first job from Carmel Snow, editor-in-chief of „Harper’s Bazaar”: On Long Island he photographed swimwear – with the model running toward him along the beach. The resulting series of shots were to make photographic history. In the years that followed, Munkácsi produced a wealth of spectacular fashion photo sequences, and his work decisively influenced the image of the modern, successful, independent and dynamic Western urban woman.
His breath-taking dance photographs marked another highpoint in his oeuvre. The most famous of these featured Fred Astaire, who in December 1936 appeared on the front page of „Life” magazine.
With „Ladies’ Home Journal” he went on to sign the most lucrative contract of any photographer of his days: for a series entitled „How America Lives”. In the years 1940 through 1946 he shot 65 of the total of 78 sequences in the series – they portrayed everyday life in America across all strata of society during the war.
Henri Cartier-Bresson believes that one particular Munkácsi image launched him on his career as a photographer, it was the „the spark that set fire to the fireworks”: The photo in question shows three young black boys jumping in the cool waves on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, an incunabulum of photography. In many of his publications, Richard Avedon cites Munkácsi as having inspired him, and in the 1950s dedicated the famous shot of the young woman jumping over a puddle, with umbrella held aloft, to the Hungarian by way of homage. Avedon felt Munkácsi was his predecessor and wrote a moving obituary on him.
Munkácsi’s frequent emphasis on the body in staging his shots is echoed in the pictures of both Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. As a professional photographer, Munkácsi was one of the outstanding champions not only of „New Kind of Seeing”, probably the most influential contribution photography made to cuttingedge art, but of Modernism per se. Nevertheless, his name was as good as forgotten. Only insiders considered him a legend.
The reason for this unfortunate circumstance is not least the fact that major US museums refused the gift of his archive after his death in 1963. As a consequence, his works were scattered around the globe, and a large part of the archive was lost. Only the Ullstein Archives in Berlin and the F. C. Gundlach collection in Hamburg still holds a more or less intact and coherent section of his oeuvre from his time in Hungary and Germany. After many years of preparations, and despite the difficulties in ascertaining the whereabouts of the works, we have succeeded in mounting a both representative and impressive retrospective of the oeuvre of one of the greatest photographers of the century. It gives him back that unique position in the history of photography that is rightfully his.
The exhibition shows more than 300 vintage prints, each of them attesting to Munkácsi’s insistence that journalistic accuracy goes hand in hand with a highly discerning formal aesthetic. They cover all the important periods in Munkácsi’s professional life, and include numerous pictures and reportages that have remained unpublished since first coming out and are thus as good as unknown today. Examples would be the cohesive and truly spectacular reports on a mining disaster near Aachen in Germany, on Liberia as the first independent country in Africa, on a pilot’s training college for women near Berlin (with quite unique aerial shots), on the destruction of surplus from the coffee harvest in South America in order to keep prices up, on a visit to newspaper baron Randolph Hearst at his „Xanadu” home, on that fateful day in Potsdam, on March 21, 1933 , when Reichs President Hindenburg officially received Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, on the first flight of a zeppelin from Europe to America, on singing Siamese twins, and on the artistry of a cowboy. The wealth of significant images and sequences of images invariably spotlights the fascinating, exciting, technology-inspired, glamorous and contradictory epoch between the two world wars, not to mention the lives of people in Europe and America back then. Munkácsi the master photographer made use of the latest means of transport of his day in order to tackle his jobs, highlighting automobiles, motorbikes, ships, zeppelins, and airplanes in his work. Then there are also unusual portraits of the likes of Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Leslie Howard and Jane Russell, taken during his frequent visits to Hollywood. Not to mention delicate high-key portrayals of cats, dogs, and a rabbit, white on white, and an impressive series of the few surviving Munkácsi masterpieces of fashion photography. In addition, the curator has succeeded in obtaining 21 original double-spreads of a dummy for a planned book which was never published – they contain outstanding vintage prints and the composition of the booklet is a perfect example of Munkácsi’s aesthetic convictions.
