From September 26, 2025 to March 01, 2026
American, Born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy traces the extraordinary artistic journeys of Hungarian-born photographers who shaped the visual landscape of the 20th century. Against backdrops of war, exile, and reinvention, these artists migrated from Hungary to Berlin and Paris, and ultimately to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where they redefined American photography. This exhibition offers the first comprehensive exploration of their odyssey—spanning two world wars and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—and the remarkable artistic contributions that emerged along the way.
Featuring over 150 striking and surreal photographs, the exhibition captures the poetic interplay of light and shadow, the grit of urban life, the allure of celebrity, and the ever-present promise of America. Included are works by renowned photographers such as André Kertész, Nickolas Muray, Martin Munkácsi, and György Kepes, alongside lesser-known artists whose images have become iconic. Among them is Robert Capa, a pioneer of modern photojournalism, whose harrowing images of D-Day at Omaha Beach remain among the most defining photographs of World War II.
This exhibition fills a missing chapter in art history, revealing the profound impact of Hungarian émigrés on American photography, particularly in major urban centers. László Moholy-Nagy, whose avant-garde experiments at the Bauhaus in Germany laid the foundation for Chicago’s “New Bauhaus,” emerges as a key figure in this transatlantic movement. Meanwhile, John Albok’s Depression-era street photography captured New York life with raw emotion, and on the West Coast, André de Dienes’ portraits of Hollywood icons, including Marilyn Monroe, played a pivotal role in shaping the Golden Age of cinema.
From evocative street scenes and high-fashion imagery to haunting war photography and cinematic portraiture, the exhibition showcases the work of more than thirty Hungarian-born artists who transformed photography in the 20th century.
American, Born Hungary is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Alex Nyerges, VMFA Director and CEO, in collaboration with Károly Kincses, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography. The exhibition premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest on April 5, 2024, to inaugurate its newly renovated galleries, before traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in October 2024. The George Eastman Museum serves as the final stop for this landmark exhibition.
Image: Nickolas Muray (American, b. Hungary, 1892–1965), Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Santa Monica, California, 1929. Gelatin silver print. George Eastman Museum, gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives