The Budapest Photo Festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2026. In keeping with tradition, the opening exhibition will be held in collaboration with the Műcsarnok. The exhibition once again features a world-renowned photographer from the ranks of Magnum Photos: this year, René Burri’s iconic photographs will be on display. To mark the anniversary, the festival is placing special emphasis on strengthening its international presence, not only through exhibitions but also through professional programs, lectures, portfolio reviews, and workshops.
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 *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 became iconic symbols of modernism—from Le Corbusier’s Chapel in 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 a hundred photographs in the exhibition, René Burri’s unique, expressive documentary style comes to life, and his images of human creation and destruction serve as a bittersweet testament to the metamorphosis of the past century.