Rochester, N.Y. — A large, fascinating photography exhibit now at the George Eastman Museum shares work by immigrants from Hungary, mainly artists who fled their homeland and settled in the U.S., where they contributed to the history of American photography.
Some in the show, like Robert Capa, who waded ashore with troops on D-Day, will be known to almost all museum visitors. His shaky and blurred picture of a U.S. soldier in the waters off Omaha Beach is recognized as one of history’s most powerful combat photographs. He’s also widely known for his picture of a Spanish soldier falling as he was shot in that country’s civil war. (It has long been debated whether the image was somehow staged).
American, Born Hungary is open at the George Eastman Museum through March 1, 2026.
It has a strong local connection: one of the curators who put it together — Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts — was born and raised in Rochester. His father, also 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 the most powerful photographs is the exhibit’s smallest: a 1917 André Kertész study of a fountain and church in fog. It’s a contact print — the same size as the negative from which it was made. The picture is less than 2 inches on a side.
The curators made the decision to exhibit this in a much larger frame, which invites visitors to step in and study the details. Contemporary art photographs are often printed quite large — six-feet wide is on the small side — but the tiny Kertész picture has a jewel-like appeal that holds its own.
Nyerges shared his theory about why photographers from Hungary were so successful:
“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 current debate and anger in the U.S. about immigration, Nyerges said the show argues for the embrace of foreigners.
“The greatness of America is the diversity of our origin,” he said. “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 photography department at the Eastman Museum, said Hungarian-born photographers had an outsized influence on the development of American photography — through the ways they looked at the world.
László Moholy-Nagy has a striking picture of boats in the Marseilles, France harbor, from 1929. Shot from almost directly overhead the boats look like fishes in the water — hunters turning into their prey. Allen said the picture was not unusual, because Moholy-Nagy and others liked to climb to gain unusual angles and approaches.
Moholy-Nagy also has a photogram in the show (a picture made with light and sensitive paper but no camera). The mysterious image looks a bit like a spaceship.
One of Kertész’s most powerful pictures is of a cloud, kissing the edge of a skyscraper.
“He really saw that as a self-portrait,” said 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 can be creating personal meanings for the works they see, Allen told Syracuse.com.
Many of these artists had to escape their homeland. Photographer Michael Simon survived World War II but most of his family was killed in Nazi concentration camps. He fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution and studied in Rochester for a master’s degree. He later taught photography for almost 30 years at Beloit College, in Wisconsin.
Simon’s two pictures of a rural rail intersection and of a cloud seem deeply personal. He references the rail lines to the concentration camps and — with a free-floating cloud — the liberty and creativity that he sought and eventually found.
The show debuted at 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 in the show explored fine-art photography — the creation of work that stands alone, rather than as an illustration or an advertisement picture. (Others produced a variety of works, either out of interest or in an effort to make a living). Many pictures by Kertész and Moholy-Nagy are exhibited, along with others — for a total of more than 150 photographs.
The exhibit is a deeply-personal family project.
“I wish my father was still around to see the show,” Nyerges said. (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 loved the exhibit, said Nyerges:
“I can tell you what he would do: He would cry. He would cry out of joy, not out of sadness.”