Robert Capa’s D-Day picture highlights new Rochester exhibit (evaluate)

Rochester, N.Y. — A big, fascinating images exhibit now on the George Eastman Museum shares work by immigrants from Hungary, primarily artists who fled their homeland and settled within the U.S., the place they contributed to the historical past of American images.

Some within the present, like Robert Capa, who waded ashore with troops on D-Day, shall be recognized to nearly all museum guests. His shaky and blurred image of a U.S. soldier within the waters off Omaha Beach is acknowledged as considered one of historical past’s strongest fight images. He’s additionally broadly recognized for his image of a Spanish soldier falling as he was shot in that nation’s civil conflict. (It has lengthy been debated whether or not the picture was someway staged).

American, Born Hungary is open on the George Eastman Museum by March 1, 2026.

It has a powerful native connection: one of many curators who put it collectively — Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts — was born and raised in Rochester. His father, additionally named Alex, was born in Hungary and emigrated to the United States in 1950 as a political refugee. He had been conscripted in World War II, a prisoner for eight months in a Russian POW camp and escaped communist Hungary in 1946.

One of essentially the most highly effective images is the exhibit’s smallest: a 1917 André Kertész research of a fountain and church in fog. It’s a contact print — the identical measurement because the destructive from which it was made. The image is lower than 2 inches on a aspect.

The curators made the choice to exhibit this in a a lot bigger body, which invitations guests to step in and research the small print. Contemporary artwork images are sometimes printed fairly giant — six-feet huge is on the small aspect — however the tiny Kertész image has a jewel-like attraction that holds its personal.

Nyerges shared his principle about why photographers from Hungary had been so profitable:

“The Hungarian language is completely impenetrable. It’s not related to anything else. If you’re not Hungarian — born and bred — you’re never going to speak it. You’re never going to understand it. But because of that, they go to Germany, they go to Paris, they go to places, and the only language they can speak is with the camera.”

With the present debate and anger in the U.S. about immigration, Nyerges stated the present argues for the embrace of foreigners.

“The greatness of America is the diversity of our origin,” he stated. “It pains me greatly as a first-generation American to see how immigrants are maligned, and then — even worse — by our federal government branded as criminals.”

Jamie Allen, curator and head of the images division on the Eastman Museum, stated Hungarian-born photographers had an outsized affect on the event of American images — by the methods they appeared on the world.

László Moholy-Nagy has a hanging image of boats within the Marseilles, France harbor, from 1929. Shot from nearly immediately overhead the boats seem like fishes within the water — hunters turning into their prey. Allen stated the image was common, as a result of Moholy-Nagy and others favored to climb to realize uncommon angles and approaches.

Moholy-Nagy additionally has a photogram within the present (an image made with mild and delicate paper however no digicam). The mysterious picture appears to be like a bit like a spaceship.

One of Kertész’s strongest footage is of a cloud, kissing the sting of a skyscraper.

“He really saw that as a self-portrait,” stated Allen. “And it was about feeling lonely and isolated in New York City after he’d had such an amazing career in Paris.”

One of the pleasures for viewers will be creating private meanings for the works they see, Allen instructed Syracuse.com.

Many of those artists needed to escape their homeland. Photographer Michael Simon survived World War II however most of his household was killed in Nazi focus camps. He fled Hungary throughout the 1956 revolution and studied in Rochester for a grasp’s diploma. He later taught images for nearly 30 years at Beloit College, in Wisconsin.

Simon’s two footage of a rural rail intersection and of a cloud appear deeply private. He references the rail traces to the focus camps and — with a free-floating cloud — the freedom and creativity that he sought and finally discovered.

The present debuted on the Museum of Fine Arts, in Budapest, Hungary. It then traveled to Nyerges’s museum, in Richmond, Virginia. The exhibit’s full title is American, born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy. Nyerges curated the exhibit with Károly Kincses, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography.

Many of the photographers within the present explored fine-art images — the creation of labor that stands alone, fairly than as an illustration or an commercial image. (Others produced quite a lot of works, both out of curiosity or in an effort to make a residing). Many footage by Kertész and Moholy-Nagy are exhibited, together with others — for a complete of greater than 150 images.

The exhibit is a deeply-personal household mission.

“I wish my father was still around to see the show,” Nyerges stated. (The elder Nyerges died in 2013).

“He knew about it because I started this more than 30 years ago as an idea, and talked to him about it more than a few times when I was finding new discoveries of yet another Hungarian-American who is not properly attributed to being ‘American, born Hungary.’ I was always saying, ‘Hey, here’s another one, Dad, look at these photographs.’”

His father would have liked the exhibit, stated Nyerges:

“I can tell you what he would do: He would cry. He would cry out of joy, not out of sadness.”