“Think while you shoot”, is the fundamental motto of the Hungarian master of photography Martin Munkacsi. While he lived with his camera in his hand and photographed everything he saw, he announced the importance of capturing the moment, the movement, the idea that is born the moment you click the camera.
The exhibition set up in Brescia at the Paci contemporary gallery, a large space dedicated to photography, is realized in collaboration with the Howard Greenberg gallery in New York and the Estate Martin Munkacsi (NY) and is accompanied by an anthological volume published by Dario Cimorelli Editore, edited by the Italian historian Andrea Tinterri, with a preface by Howard Greenberg.
On display are more than 80 works, celebrated and multi-published shots, mainly from the Martin Munkacsi Estate, making the exhibition at Paci contemporary one of the largest European anthological exhibitions ever devoted to the Hungarian master.
In his day, Martin Munkacsi was one of the most famous photographers in the world. His dynamic photographs of sports, celebrities, politics and street life in the late 1920s and 1930s were made in a new free style that captured the speed and movement of the modern era.
As a young photojournalist, he mainly photographed sporting events and, at the end of the 1920s, worked in Berlin with László Moholy-Nagy and Ernő Friedmann (who later became famous as Robert Capa), for innovative magazines in the burgeoning German market. After the events of 1933 he left Germany.
A contract from Carmel Snow, the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, then led him to New York, where he made his fame and fortune mainly with fashion photography.
His dynamic style was an inspiration for all the photographers to come, including Richard Avedon, who declared himself an admirer of the Hungarian photographer from an early age, ‘We are all little Munkácsi’ he said, and for Cartier-Bresson, who saw in his photographs that moment that he too would always try to capture.
Munkácsi’s photographs can be found in collections all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the International Center of Photography (New York), the George Eastman House (Rochester) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Martin Munkacsi : Think while you shoot
November 30, 2024 – March 30, 2025
Paci Contemporary Gallery – Borgo Wuhrer
Via Borgo Pietro Wuhrer, 53
Brescia 25123, Italy
www.pacicontemporary.com
