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1894 (Munkács) - 1980 (New York) Born as the eldest boy of eleven children. He started his apprenticeship in his father's tailor's workshop at the age of eight. At the age of thirteen he exchanged his telescope for a Kodak Brownie camera and set up a darkroom in the cellar of their house. He was called up for military service in the army of the Monarchy in 1917. His pictures exhibited in the military hospital in Pozsony have disappeared in the tempest of the war.
He emigrated to the United States in1921. He opened a tailor's workshop on the Madison Avenue and spent his freetime on photographing. At the beginning he photographed religious festivals in Hungarian churches, and he also took photographs of animals and the life in the metropolis. In 1929 during the great depression he photographed unemployed and poor people in New York. He took pictures of the festivals of Bugac puszta near New York, the Hungarian events of the world exhibition in 1940, programmes of Hungarian cultural and charity societies and Béla Bartók's concerts. He made more than 16.000 exposures in his life.
His photographs can be found in Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Art, and several other collections. He lived to see his first exhibition entitled Through the Eye of Needle in Hungary in 1976 in the Museum of Labour Movement. In 1997 Budapest Gallery arranged his retrospective exhibition. |