This is what Richard Avedon said about him: “He brought a taste for happiness and honesty and a love of women to what was, before him, a joyless, lying art. He was the first…”

Munkacsi was at the peak of his profession both in Budapest and Berlin when he came to New York for a few days in 1933. Carmel Snow, the editor of Harpers Bazaar, asked him to reshoot a fashion feature they had already done in a studio. In those days, all fashion photography was static, shot with studio lighting.

Munkacsi had never done fashion photography before but he insisted on taking the top model to a beach on Long Island. It was November and she was standing in her swimsuit blue with cold while he tried to explain without a word of English that he wanted her to run. That shot made history, a watershed in fashion photography.

Later when he emigrated to the United States, Munkacsi was to become the star photographer for Harpers Bazaar, Life Magazine and the Ladies Home Journal. He was remarkably quick on the job, never taking more than one or two shots of his subject; his motto was “Think while you shoot”. The most important work was done later in the dark room. He claimed to have soaked photographs in bath tubs in almost every country in the world.

Sadly, in the aftermath of the Second World War his career went into decline. Other photographers had adopted his techniques and his private life was unraveling as one of his daughters died and his third wife divorced him perhaps because he was an unrepentant ladies man.

Munkacsi himself died in 1963 in poverty and obscurity. The last thing he pawned was his camera. “In 1932 I saw a photograph of Martin Munkacsi of three black children running into the sea and I must say that it is that photograph that set fire to fireworks and made me suddenly realize that photography could reach eternity through the moment…..I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street.”

That was Henri Cartier Bresson. His iconic photograph of a boy jumping over a puddle comes immediately to mind.

By Anne Marshall Zwack for XpatLoop.com

Anne was born in England in 1946, grew up in Cambridge and was educated in England and in Belgium. She lived and worked for several years in Paris, Rome and Milan where she met Peter Zwack who swept her off her feet and eventually brought her back to Hungary.

During this time she wrote for many important American publications including the Travel Section of the New York Times, Travel + Leisure and Gourmet Magazine. She currently divides her time between Budapest and Tuscany. Peter and Anne Zwack have two children and were married for forty years.