Hungarian Emigre Photographers: How They Changed 20th-Century American Photography

📸 Hungarian Emigre Photographers: How They Changed 20th-Century American Photography

In the first half of the 20th century, several photographers from Hungary found themselves at the center of rapid changes in American and European visual culture. They photographed cities and people, experimented with form, mastered the language of advertising and fashion, and gradually transformed photography from a tool for recording reality into an independent artistic language.

On this meeting we will talk about how emigration changed their own work — and how their work changed photography. Together with practicing photographer Ti Bazanova we will analyze the work of Martin Munkácsi, Robert Capa, Brassaï, André Kertész, and László Moholy-Nagy and try to understand why these authors turned out to be so important for the history of photography.

We'll discuss:

• how ordinary objects, the urban environment, and even trash became material for art;
• how photography stopped being merely a means of recording reality and became a field for experimentation;
• how one photographer changed the idea of what fashion photography could be;
• who influenced Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Richard Avedon;
• how the photographer gradually became an independent media figure.

And most importantly — why Hungarian emigre photographers were so important in shaping the visual language of the 20th century.

🗣The meeting is hosted by Ti Bazanova — a practicing photographer researching the history of photography and how photography developed as an art and visual language.

🗓 August 3 (Monday) 19:00

The meeting will be of interest to photographers, as well as anyone interested in the history of photography who wants to gain a deeper understanding of how photography gradually transformed from a tool for recording reality into an independent artistic language.

📍Vojvode Dobrnjca 48, Belgrade