7. Martin Munkácsi - Photography

MARTIN MUNKÁCSI (Kolozsvár, Hungary 1896 – New York 1963)

Martin Munkácsi was born in Hungary in 1896 and began his photographic career in 1921, working in sports photography for the Hungarian daily Az Est. Largely self-taught, he had served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War and worked as a writer and reporter before becoming a full-time professional photographer.

His distinctive quality lay in his ability to photograph sports while paying close attention to composition and introducing an unmistakable artistic sensibility. In 1928, he moved to Berlin, where he began working for various magazines, covering stories in Germany and major cities around the world. On assignment for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, the leading German illustrated magazine of the time, he photographed members of Hitler’s inner circle, despite being a foreigner and Jewish.

In 1934, the Nazis nationalized the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, dismissed its Jewish editor-in-chief Kurt Korff, and replaced its innovative photography with images glorifying German troops.

Munkácsi emigrated to the United States in 1933, already well known as a photojournalist and sports photographer. In November of that year, Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, together with Alexey Brodovitch, the magazine’s new art director, invited him to work on a special issue titled “Palm Beach”, shot at Piping Rock Beach.

Munkácsi had never photographed fashion before and spoke very little English. With the help of an interpreter, he asked the model Lucile Brokaw, semi-frozen in a swimsuit and cape, to run toward the camera along the beach. Munkácsi photographed her at full speed, her cape billowing in the wind.

Before that day, fashion magazines had largely been filled with pages of elegantly posed society models, moving gracefully from one carefully arranged pose to another. By definition, fashion photographers were studio photographers—often masters of their craft, such as Baron de Meyer and Edward Steichen—but bound by venerable studio traditions that produced a kind of carefully composed, artificially lit visual taxidermy.

Munkácsi introduced a dynamic, athletic, yet still glamorous woman. With him—and inspired by him—fashion photography became less rigid and more capable of engaging with reality. Reality was no longer limited to salons and theater premieres, but expanded to include horseback riding, tennis, swimming, and vacations.

His influence extended to photographers such as Richard Avedon—who, as a teenager, kept one of Munkácsi’s photographs pinned to his bedroom wall—and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

At his death in 1963, at the age of sixty-seven after a second heart attack, Munkácsi was largely forgotten.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about the intrusion of real, moving women into the pages of fashion magazines. Vogue editor Edna Chase famously referred to them as “farm girls jumping over fences.” Yet the Munkácsi–Snow collaboration was clearly a vision whose time had come.

After the beach shoot, Carmel Snow—much to Munkácsi’s surprise—offered him a contract, despite the reservations of publisher William Randolph Hearst, who dismissed Munkácsi as merely a “snapshot photographer.” Perhaps for that very reason, Snow embraced him: the spontaneity of the snapshot was exactly what she wanted.

In every issue, women could be seen playing tennis, swinging golf clubs, diving, dancing, and riding horses. Rather than staging traditional poses for the camera, Munkácsi inspired his subjects to dance, jump, and spin, infusing the photographs with energy and personality.

Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue, once said to Steichen: “Every woman photographed by de Meyer looks like a model. You make every model look like a woman.” Munkácsi achieved something even more remarkable: he made every model look like a woman you would enjoy being with.

A passionate admirer of the human body and its movement, he often photographed dancers. One of his most famous images is a portrait of Fred Astaire. Munkácsi also took the first nude ever published in Harper’s Bazaar.