Martin Munkacsi

Martin Munkacsi was never at a loss for self-confidence and set great store by the fact that he was the best paid photographer of his time. Indisputably one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century, he shaped the beginnings of modern photojournalism and set into motion the previously static medium of photography. Munkacsi combined journalistic accuracy with a highly formal aesthetic standard. He was an outstanding representative of the "Neues Sehen," arguably photography's weightiest contribution to advanced art. His fashion photography was groundbreaking and his sports photography was unmatched.
Munkacsi's work did not remain intact. It was scattered throughout the world and, to some extent, lost. Only the Ullstein Archive in Berlin maintains a fairly extensive collection of his life's work from his days in Hungary and Germany. In this volume Munkacsi's images have been brought together in a previously unexplored presentation, combining pictures from all his artistic phases and several photographs and bodies of work that have not been seen since their initial magazine publication. Munkacsi's work reveals a tense, technology-obsessed, glamorous and contradictory epoch.