Péter Korniss

Péter Korniss was born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on August 4, 1937. Since 1949, he has lived in Budapest. Over thirty years, he has worked as photo reporter for the Budapest edition of Nők Lapja (Women’s Magazine), collaborated with international magazines, such as GEO, National Geographic, Fortune, Forbes, and Avenue as freelance photographer. He has been a member of the Advisory Board of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (USA) and of the World Press Photo International Advisory Committee. For twenty years, he has been a member of the international jury of Czech Press Photo.

As a documentary photographer, Korniss devoted over half a century to capturing the vanishing peasant life and culture. For ten years, starting in the late 1970s, with a camera in his hand, he observed the life of a worker who had to move away from home to feed his family. This is how the book The Guest Worker (1988) came into being. Pictures taken during this period formed the basis for the photographer’s most prominent books: Heaven’s bridegroom (1975), Past Time (1979), Inventory: Transylvanian Pictures 1967–1998 (1998), Attachment (2008), The Flow of Time (2017).

Exhibitions of works by Péter Korniss were held in museums and galleries in seventeen countries across the globe. His works can be found in the Hungarian Museum of Photography, Nicéphore Niépce Museum (France), National Science and Media Museum (United Kingdom), Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest), Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, USA) and in the Archive of Modern Conflict (Toronto, Canada).