Setting Life in Motion

Long Forgotten, Martin Munkacsi Energized the Future of Photography

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Setting Life in Motion
Long forgotten, photographer Martin Munkacsi energized the future of photography. His works are now on view in "Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot," an exhibition at International Center of Photography in New York.

NEW YORK -- The Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi was born in 1896 and made his reputation first as a sports photographer in Budapest, then as a photojournalist in Berlin, and finally shooting fashion in the United States after Hitler's rise.

The first full survey of his photographs has just appeared in print. It accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition of his work, "Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot," now at the International Center of Photography in New York.

It's about time.

The great Henri Cartier-Bresson said that an image by Munkacsi was "the spark that set fire to fireworks" when he saw it in 1932. Munkacsi, as a photojournalist, had taken the innovations of radical modern art -- strange angles, pared-down compositions, raw nervous energy -- and used them as a filter for looking at a living modern world. Cartier-Bresson learned to look through it, too. (A major Cartier-Bresson show is downstairs from Munkacsi's at the ICP.)

When Munkacsi died in 1963, Richard Avedon wrote that the Hungarian had been his hero since childhood, when he started pasting favorite photos onto his bedroom walls. "The world of what is called fashion is peopled with Munkacsi's babies, his heirs," he said. Before Munkacsi, clothing shoots were mostly about mannequin-stiff models posed on stagy sets. Munkacsi made his women come alive out in the world, climbing onto buildings and leaping over puddles. That's how Avedon came to shoot his, too.

Despite earning a fortune and acclaim before and during World War II -- he was as wealthy and well-known as many of his Hollywood subjects -- Munkacsi died forgotten and in abject poverty. By the end, he had pawned even his precious cameras. Well into the 1980s, some photo dealers didn't even know his name.

Now that we finally have a chance to admire the full range of his photos, all that's harder than ever to believe. (That range can be appreciated even better in the new book -- a lavish 416-page, $65 hardcover published by the ICP -- than in the show. Munkacsi's images were always meant for publication, not for admiration as precious objects on the wall.)

The sports shots that launched Munkacsi's career would still get front-page play today. Rather than portraying sporting heroes looking fine, as most earlier images had, Munkacsi caught sport's crucial moments of excitement: He shows a goalie leaping for a soccer ball, a biplane careening through blue skies, a motorcycle racer plowing through a puddle and almost drowning in the spray.

Branching out into photojournalism, and a broader spread of subjects, didn't slow down Munkacsi's images. A troupe of trudging sanitation workers in Brazil (not an obviously tempting subject) becomes a surging phalanx of ladders and diagonals, thanks only to Munkacsi's Bauhaus-modern composition.

And -- crucial portent of Munkacsi's crucial later contribution to photography -- a young lady walking down the beach, sometime around 1930, isn't just a person taking air. Shooting from above, Munkacsi combines the rushing angles of her body as it strides across the frame with her sporty, belted bathing suit and tousled, flying hair. He turns her into the archetypal Modern Woman.

That's what the great Carmel Snow, a pioneering editor at Harper's Bazaar, must have spotted in Munkacsi's work when she invited him to join her New York team in 1933.

For Harper's, Munkacsi doesn't shoot some nameless beauty coyly modeling beachwear. He presents the young socialite Lucile Brokaw, caught on the fly as she runs by the ocean in a bathing suit and cape.

In Munkacsi's shots, women aren't just attractive clotheshorses. They've chosen the clothes they wear, the lives they lead, the actions they take.

That may only be a pretense -- but it was one worth trying out.

Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot, is at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Sixth Ave., New York, through April 29. Call 212-857-0000 or visit http://www.icp.org/.