Hungarian photography

An excellent exhibition at the Royal Academy in July 2011, it included familiar names like Brassai, Capa and Kertesz, and unfamiliar ones - Kata Kalman, Gyorgy Lorinczy, Martin Munkacsi, Károly Escher, György Kepes, Rudolf Balogh, Stefan Lorant.

You can read the article from the RA Magazine here;  why did this wealth of talent come out of Hungary? It's to do with Hungary's tragic history in the first half of the 20th century - loss of territory, economic collapse, and isolation. But more importantly, "these artists were rapt attenders to the ‘music of what happens’ " - and interestingly, most of the Hungarian photographers living in exile elsewhere never managed fluency in the adopted language, but looked to photography for their narratives, a language of images.