To see the true nature of a place, sometimes you need an outsider’s perspective. That’s one of the themes of two photography exhibitions opening simultaneously this fall at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and comprising about 350 images.

“American, born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy” is the culmination of two decades of research by Alex Nyerges, director and chief executive officer of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curator of the exhibition, which will share lower-level gallery space in the museum with “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.”

The story of Hungarian-born photographers’ impact and influence in America is one that has never been fully told, Nyerges says. Meanwhile, it’s been over 25 years since a major exhibition delved into photography of the South. 

Both shows shine a light on America’s allure, as well as its shortcomings, including disenfranchisement, racism and inequality.

“When these photographers come from Hungary to document America, they’re seeing it in a whole new way, and a lot of photographers coming from elsewhere to document the South are doing the same thing,” Nyerges says. “So both of these shows, although historical in the respect of being surveys, are also very relevant to our world and the troubles we face.”

“American, Born Hungary,” debuted in April at the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest and is co-curated by Kincses Károly, founding director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography. The exhibition traces the photographers’ journey to Germany, Paris, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Nyerges notes that they fled economic calamity and antisemitism. 

“They come with this idealized version of America as this land of golden opportunity and what they find is a very different reality,” he says, such as poverty in the shadows of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. “André de Dienes goes out into the Southwest and finds Native Americans living in squalor as victims of our government.” 

De Dienes also famously photographed a young Marilyn Monroe on a Los Angeles beach in 1949.

The photographers’ stories resonate with Nyerges, whose father was a photographer born in Hungary; after moving in the 1950s to the United States, he worked at Eastman Kodak Co. in Rochester, New York. As a kid, Nyerges would ride his bicycle to the Eastman Museum and look at the photography collection. 

“My own photography is influenced to a significant degree by people like André Kertész,” he says, noting the photographer’s modernist style — “these acute angles from up high, stressing light and shadows, and particularly sharp contrast.”

Also among the more than 30 photographers featured in the exhibition are Robert Capa, a war photographer who accompanied the U.S. military in the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion; renowned fashion photographer Martin Munkácsi; and Laslo Maholy-Nasz, who taught at the Bauhaus school of art in Germany and then moved to Chicago and became director of The New Bauhaus (now part of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech). 

“Richard Avedon, arguably the most well-known fashion photographer of all time, credits Martin Munkácsi for inspiring him to be a photographer,” Nyerges says.

A ticket to “American, Born Hungary” will also cover admission to “A Long Arc,” co-curated by Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at VMFA, with Gregory J. Harris, The Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. 

“The show covers a long and at times painful history but one that’s also, just like the exhibition, filled with moments of grace and beauty,” Kennel says. 

Drawing on the High Museum’s extensive collection of Southern photography, “A Long Arc” takes visitors on a journey of more than 175 years, featuring images by Southern and non-Southern photographers. The exhibition includes works by Virginians Sally Mann and Susan Worsham, as well as Swiss American photographer Robert Frank, William Eggleston of Tennessee and Missouri-born Walker Evans, among many others.

“One of the things we really didn’t want to do was create a false dichotomy in the exhibition — insider versus outsider,” Kennel says. “If you begin to look at the work in the show, you realize that some of the most powerful and perceptive work is being done by photographers who are coming to the South to try to understand it as a place.”

Baldwin Lee, who was born in a Chinese immigrant community in New York City and studied with Evans, is a strong example, she adds. 

“His practice was really about trying to provide visibility to communities that either were totally ignored, or if they were photographed, it was often very much in sociological terms,” she says. “He works with his subjects. He’s working with a large format camera, so he’s not capturing things on the fly. It’s really a collaboration.”

The show opened at the High Museum, where Kennel previously worked as curator of photography, in September 2023 and then traveled to the Addison Gallery of Art in Andover, Massachusetts. 

“One of the things we were really pleased about was having a venue in the Northeast,” Kennel says. “Our goal was to show that Southern photography is also American photography. Southern history is American history.”

“American, born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy” and “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845” are scheduled to run from Oct. 5, 2024 to Jan. 26, 2025.