Strolling down Nagymező utca in Budapest's 6th district, you will encounter the well-known names of Robert Capa and Elliott Erwitt. To begin with, there are two parallel exhibitions from the photographs of Erwitt, one in the Capa Center for Contemporary Photography and one in Mai Manó House. While the former is a wide retrospective from the products of 50 years, including some well-known and iconic photographs, the latter is a rare compendium of pictures taken in 1964 during Erwitt's visit in Hungary, which he made as part of an assignment in Eastern European countries. Capa Center also shows a selection from photographs by the legendary reporter Robert Capa in an exhibition which runs until the end of the year.
"You can find picture anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them" - Elliott Erwitt
Capa Center features works by Erwitt from the 1950s to the 2000s. The thematically organised exhibition lets prevail the humor, irony, everyday poesy and, sometimes, melancholy that is characteristic to Erwitt's pictures.
Visual humor is a recurring theme of Erwitt's photographs, let it be an abstraction of images, a series of sequential photographs or simply an observation of the human nature.
Humor is also the word that is most often cited in connection with Erwitt. But humor is for him not a joke: even his irony is filled with humanism and love.
A small selection of photographs by Robert Capa is also on show in Capa Center. The curators aimed to bring to the public less-known pictures along with iconic ones. Born in 1913 in Budapest, Robert Capa got to world fame as a war photographer. Reflecting Capa's life and work in a more wider aspect, as a photo reporter, the Budapest exhibition also includes pictures of peace and everyday life, like some from his report on the 1939 Tour de France race.
The exhibits belong to one of the three authentic collections of Capa's oeuvre, known as the Master's Sets. The 937-pieces strong collection belongs to the Hungarian National Museum. Among the some 50 photographs on show there are 18 that have not been exhibited in Hungary before.
Elliott Erwitt: Retrospective. Robert Capa Kortárs Fotográfiai Központ, June 15 to September 10, 2017.
Elliott Erwitt in Hungary. Mai Manó Ház - Magyar Fotográfusok Háza, June 15 to September 10, 2017.
The photojournalist Robert Capa. Robert Capa Kortárs Fotográfiai Központ, June 27 to 31, December 2017.