Remarks by Tamas Revesz

I feel privileged and honored that this exhibition could happen.

Art hardly can survive without Sponsors and I am grateful to name who helped this exhibition. And those were:

– Yoshio Murakami, Advisor of International Affairs at Asahi Shimbun, a friend of my son Andras, who was the driving force for making this exhibition. Without you we were not here today.
– Asahi Shimbun, (by the way, 16 years ago I got a beautiful bronze medal from Asahi Shimbun as an award for my picture sent to the 48th Photographic Salon of Japan),
– Sister City Program of the City of New York,
– Tokyo Government,
– American Embassy Tokyo,
– Hungarian Embassy Tokyo,
– Toshizo Arami, TAC America (a Japanese forwarding company),
– Jewel Spiegel Gallery in Englewood, New Jersey, USA,
– Nielsen-Bainbridge, New Jersey, USA
– Winthrop H. Smith, Jr.
– Cultural Exchange Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Let me share with you some personal background so you can appreciate the informality when I am thanking my family.

In 1997 when I was awarded by Pulitzer Memorial Award for my tenth photo book publication “Budapest A City Before the Millennium”, in Hungary, we got a chance to move to America.

We left behind a steady successful life just because of the challenge of the unexpected possibility to renew ourselves in an absolute unfamiliar environment. It was obvious for me that my next book project would be New York.

I did not have a job but was photographing the city for three years without any assignment or realistic hope to be published. I did not know a single editor. That was a difficult period of time, and without my family in my background I even could not have dreamt such a big dream.

To make the story short, the first editor Jim Mairs, who I happen presented my idea and portfolio was a celebrity editor (what I did not know that time of course) and he fall in love to my project. So, W.W.Norton, one of the finest publishing houses in Manhattan launched my book in the same year, in 2000.

My goal with the book was to show that New York, as they say, the “Capital of the World” is not a jungle of skyscrapers but is a wonderful place to live and visit. Tragically 9/11 in the next year made several of my photographs iconic images.

I feel myself fortunate today that I may say that I am at home both in Hungary and in America and that I can contribute some way with my work to both countries.

Tokyo is the very first city hosting this exhibition which I hope will travel to all ten Sister Cities of New York City: Beijing, Budapest, Cairo, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, London, Madrid, Rome, Santo Domingo.

UMU Gallery,
Roppongi Hills, Tokyo
JULY 22, 2004