NYAB Event - Péter Korniss Exhibition

Péter Korniss Exhibition

Hungarian Cultural Center

This event has ended.

The black-and-white photographs of Péter Korniss—Hungarian photographer and humanitarian artist—trace the everyday stories of villagers in rural Hungary and Transylvania. From starkly beautiful portraits to stunning, expansive landscapes, Korniss’ lens captures disappearing ways of life, and bears witness to the transformation of the countryside after 1989.

Korniss’ photographs focus on the village folk, industrial workers, children, and the elderly of Hungary and Transylvania. Through Korniss’ eyes, we learn about, and grow a fondness for, these people and their culture. "To preserve a way of life that will soon disappear! As a photographer I couldn't have found a better task for myself. The gift of photography is that we can preserve even the most ephemeral subject: man, in the world he created and in which he lives."

In 1967, Korniss noted that "in the dim light of a 'dance house' in Szek, it was as if nothing had changed here in this tiny Transylvanian village for a hundred years." Yet, by the beginning of the 1990s, ". . . after the political landslide in East Europe, the life of the old, familiar villages began to change before my eyes. The changes came swiftly and were eyecatching. The symbols of distant worlds arrived in peasant homes."

The ’Attachment’ exhibition features forty large-scale black-and-white photographs, including photos from Korniss’ book Attachment 1967-2008 (Fresno Fine Art Publications), which records more than forty years of disappearing peasant way of life and culture.