“The most professional American tourists call themselves foreign correspondents, and when they have been born outside the United States, their favorite subject is revisiting. I have revisited Budapest because I happen to have been born there, and because the place offered only a short season for revisiting,” wrote Capa in 1952.

The short season allowed by Hungary for the photojournalist’s return lasted from early September to mid-October 1948. The illustrated reportage on the visit was published under the title “Conversation in Budapest” in the November 1949 issue of the American magazine Holiday.

Robert Capa wrote several entertaining reports on European tourist paradises for the imagined readers of the full-color monthly travel and luxury life magazine launched after World War II. “Conversation in Budapest,” however, is an exception among the photojournalist’s light-hearted pieces written for the wealthy, as it touches on the homeland Capa left behind in the 1930s and the impossibility of ever returning.

The exhibition presents this impossible mission, placing the former Endre Friedmann back into the ruined setting of his youth.

In 1948, Robert Capa is already 35 years old, an American citizen, a recipient of the Medal of Freedom, John Steinbeck’s travel companion and collaborator on what would become A Russian Journal; he is part of a lively international network of professionals and comrades. He is the co-founder of the independent photo agency known as Magnum. He speaks out in the New York Herald Tribune against the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, incitement, and hostility.

His return home in the fall of 1948 is not the first since he left seventeen years earlier, but it is his longest stay in Hungary since 1931—and he would never return again.The following year, a few of his photos taken here were featured in an exhibition and some of them appeared in foreign magazines, but he never published a book-length “report on Hungary,” unlike in the case of the projects he collaborated on with other authors in that period. Through the available photographs and the contact sheets on display here for the first time, this exhibition explores the themes that the already world-famous photojournalist was interested in and wanted to work on.

Éva Fisli
curator