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Orshi Drozdik’s poem from 1977, “I Am a Photograph,” accompanies her photography series “Sigh and Blink” in the George Eastman Museum’s latest exhibition “American, born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy.”
“I’m an image with light/Of course in black and white/Soaked in chemicals and on photo paper,” the poem reads. “And I’ve developed the photograph/I sigh and blink.”
The two pieces of “Sigh and Blink” that accompany the poem are a series of self-portraits, arranged to show a sequence of the artist sighing and then blinking. One work shows the entirety of her face, while the centers of the other are obscured by strips of white.
The work, when viewed as a whole, explores many themes. Some of those include existence and identity, elements that are important to Drozdik, who sometimes feels in between worlds.
“Somebody asked, ‘Are you American? Are you Hungarian?’ How I feel is Hungarian, but how I think is American. I don’t think like other Hungarians,” explains Drozdik. “If my work is put between other Hungarian artists, it somehow doesn’t talk with the others.”
This exhibit feels different, however.
“The title hit my heart,” she says, emphasizing how accurate it felt to her experience.
“The title for the show comes from the fact that, in the museum world, we put what nationality people are currently, and where they were born,” notes Alex Nyerges, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts director and CEO, and co-curator of the exhibit. “But it also comes from my (Hungarian born) dad who said, ‘This country gave me my freedom, and without freedom I would not be who I am.’ He was proud to be an American, but also proud to be born in Hungary.”
“American, born Hungary” seeks to complete a hidden chapter in art history by documenting the tremendous impact that Hungarian immigrants and exiles had on American photography, especially those who arrived between the early 20th century and the post-World War II diaspora.
Throughout Nyerges’ career, he found that many photographers of Hungarian origin had been incorrectly labeled as German, French, English, or from another European country.
Many who fled religious and political persecution or economic strife were constant transplants, spending years in different countries. For example, André Kertész lived in Paris for 11 years before leaving for New York City to escape the growing Nazi regime. Robert Capa similarly lived in Germany and France for eight years before coming to the U.S.
Due to that diaspora, Nyerges found in his research that records labeled many Hungarian artists with the country they were arriving from, rather than their actual origin.
“The fact of the matter is, many of these photographers have been misattributed along the way as French or German or British,” says Nyerges, who curated the exhibit with Károly Kincses, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography. “Yet they were born and raised in Hungary, they come to America and they have an outsized impact on the history of photography in this country.”
The collected works of “American, born Hungarian” were literally decades in the making, as he can recall having a similar idea in the early 1990s during his tenure as director and CEO at the Dayton Art Institute. While it was rejected in favor of an Ansel Adams exhibit, Nyerges, whose father was born in Hungary and immigrated to Rochester, never lost sight of it.
Partly, this is due to the remarkable impact Hungarian photographers had on the American art form and in fashion, popular culture, Hollywood, war photojournalism, and civil rights photography.
“Their impact is larger and more important than the impact of any other country in the world. And if you’re standing there in disbelief of that, that’s not the first time I’ve faced that,” Nyerges says.
He points to André de Dienes’ intimate and natural photos of 19-year-old Norma Jeane, which paved the way for her rise to fame as starlet Marilyn Monroe.
Martin Munkácsi revolutionized fashion photography when he brought swimsuit models to Long Island’s Piping Rock beach in 1933 to shoot them with dynamic, natural movement, rather than a posed studio shoot.
Similarly, the Hungarian-born Capa was a generation-defining war photographer as the only civilian to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day. One of his most iconic photos, “The Falling Soldier,” which shows a loyalist militiaman in the Spanish Civil War being shot, is on display with the exhibit.
While never identifying himself as a surrealist, Kertész left his mark on the movement with his series of distortion photographs. Utilizing a funhouse mirror from a Parisian amusement park, his portraits of nude models warped and distorted the subject to remarkable effect.
Nyerges says when meeting with a collector for the show, he was taken aback at the revelation that the mirror was still around.
“He asked me, ‘Oh, for the exhibition, would you like the mirror?’ and I listened to the question and I couldn’t understand what he meant so I asked, ‘What mirror?’ He said ‘The mirror! The mirror Kertész used to create the distortions!’ All I could think to say to that with disbelief was, ‘You have the mirror?’” he recalls.
The curator invites visitors to create their own distortions in the mirror, which is also on display at the exhibit.
“American, born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy” is now on exhibit in the George Eastman House’s main galleries until March 1, 2026.
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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