Martin Munkacsi

edited by F.C. Gundlach ; texts and research by Klaus Honnef and Enno Kaufhold ; foreword by Richard Avedon
Original ed.: Göttingen : Steidl Verlag, 2005, on the occasion of the exhibition at the Internationales Haus der Photographie, Hamburg, April 15-July 31
We cite from the cover: -
"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. Born in Koloszvâr, Hungary, in 1896, he published his first sports photos in 1921, and in 1927 moved to Berlin, where he worked for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Uhu, Die Dame, Vu and other international publications. By the time he emigrated to the USA in 1934, he had revolutionized fashion photography. He worked for Harper's Bazaar, published works in LIFE to great acclaim, and photographed the influential series 'How Americans Live' for Ladies' Home Journal. 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, and he was hugely influential: his photo 'Boys running into the surf at Lake Tanganyika' inspired Henri Cartier-Bresson to take up the art. -
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. This volume brings together for the first time images from all Munkacsi's artistic phases, including several photographs and bodies of work seen here for the first time since initial magazine publication. Munkacsi's work reveals a tense, technology-obsessed, glamorous and contradictory epoch. -
With 318 tritone illustrations".