René Burri: Utopia | The 10th Anniversary of the Budapest Photo Festival at the Műcsarnok

René Burri, best known for his portrait of Che Guevara smoking a cigar, reported on the most significant events of the second half of the twentieth century as a true photojournalist during the era of mass-circulation photo magazines. He joined the Magnum Photo Agency in 1955 and became a full member in 1959. Over the course of his six-decade career, he traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, North, Central, and South America, Japan, and China. He was in Berlin when the Wall fell, photographed the student protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and documented the devastation of war in Beirut. The exhibition titled Utopia, however, offers a fresh perspective on Burri’s multifaceted body of work, with the significant transformations of the century finding expression in the formal language of modern architecture. In this sense, this selection can also be seen as a tribute to architecture: Burri captured buildings that have become icons of modernism—from Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ronchamp to Oscar Niemeyer’s ministry buildings designed for Rio de Janeiro and Brasília—in his uniquely artistic photographs. Paris Match, among other publications, gave prominent space to his photo series, where his artist portraits also appeared; of these, the exhibition focuses on the world-famous creators of modern architecture. Through nearly one hundred photographs in the exhibition, visitors can experience René Burri’s unique, expressive documentary style, and the images of human creation and destruction serve as a bittersweet testament to the metamorphosis of the past century.

Curator: Zsuzsanna Tulipán