"Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot!" International Center of Photography, New York.(Exhibition notes)

"Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot!" International Center of Photography, New York. January 19, 2007-April 29, 2007

In the early 1930S, the photographer Martin Munkacsi (the family name was Mermelstein) rescued the genre of fashion photography from the prevailing preference for artifice. The photographer Richard Avedon paid tribute to Munkacsi's naturalistic style with Carmen (Homage to Munkacsi (1957), a remake of Munkacsi's iconic photograph of a well-dressed woman, umbrella in one hand, handbag in the other, captured gracefully mid-leap. Avedon later thanked Munkacsi for bringing "a taste for happiness and honesty and a love of women to what was, before him, a joyless, loveless, lying art."

Munkacsi's reportage also caught the eye of the young Henri Cartier-Bresson, who in 1932 was struck by the photo Boys Running into the Surf at Lake Tanganyika. Cartier-Bresson asserted that after viewing it, he knew immediately that "photography could reach eternity through the moment" and thus took his cameras to the street.

This juxtaposition of whimsical fashion and pictorial journalism is brought into high relief at the current International Center of Photography retrospective, "Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot!" The exhibition coincides with "Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932-1946," and both shows capture the "decisive moment."

Born in Hungary in 1896, Munkacsi achieved early fame with his journalistic work in Budapest, then spent the 1920S and 1930s in Berlin, working at the illustrated news journal Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and elsewhere. His photos of the Day of Potsdam and Adolf Hitler are visually arresting, no less so because the photographer himself was Jewish. His daring often knew no bounds. His vantage point included aerials, sports, military pageantry, fashion, and portraiture. Supple and turbulent, the images resonate with a frenzied movement, captured in fine gradations of gray and the detailed observations from his large format camera. Munkacsi scorned the 35mm cameras employed by so many journalists of the day; the smallest format he used was 9 x 12 cm.

When Munkacsi was thirty-five, his work was included among the hundred best photographs in the world. While Man Ray and the Hungarians Andre Kertesz and Brassai were in Paris, Munkacsi was at the center of Berlin's cultural heyday. Technology had changed the way the world was perceived: "New Objectivity" and the "New Photography" movement dictated a sharp-focus documentary style where poetry had once prevailed. ...