Imre Kinszki was an artist of a tragic fate. He was born in Budapest on March 10, 1901. In 1921, with the introduction of discriminatory laws against the Jews in Hungary, Kinszki was forced to leave the university. He had to reconcile the need to get wages with the passion for art, combining office work and photographing. In 1937, together with two other photographers, he co-founded the Modern Hungarian Photographers Group. Imre Kinszki’s works appeared in Hungarian editions as well as in renowned foreign magazines, such as American Photography and National Geographic. Since 1944, he had been regularly enlisted in Jewish forced labor battalions. Kinszki died in a concentration camp during the Second World War. His wife and daughter survived the Holocaust in the Budapest ghetto, treasuring the box of negatives entrusted to them by the husband and father. The exhibition “Imre Kinszki. Fragments” features a selection of the negatives that remained intact, familiarizing the viewers with the life of prewar Budapest.

Imre Kinszki was one of the foremost representatives of the new Hungarian photography. Kinszki was greatly influenced by modernism in the photographic art of the 1930s and 1940s. Imre Kinszki was proficient in five languages, collaborated with the international press and was acquainted with the works of the prominent foreign photographers. Original visual language and daring composition, vivid imagery, contrasts of light and shade are characteristic of his city and genre photos. In a spontaneous and unconstrained manner, Kinszki masterfully captured the atmosphere of foggy and rainy days, allowing the viewers to experience the reality of everyday life in Budapest. Kinszki preferred unconventional camera angles, such as ‘the window perspective’: he took many of his famous photographs out of his office window.