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The Hague Photography Museum showcases Eva Besnyö’s wide-ranging work

A major retrospective links newly acquired photographs to the wider development of the Dutch-Hungarian photographer.

The Hague Photography Museum is presenting a major retrospective of Eva Besnyö. The exhibition opened in September and builds on a substantial expansion of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag collection.

The exhibition is titled ‘Eva Besnyö – The Liberated Camera’. The Photography Museum describes the presentation as one of the largest retrospectives ever devoted to her work. The emphasis therefore lies not only on individual well-known photographs, but on the development of her oeuvre over several decades.

The exhibition follows a significant acquisition for the collection. In its 2023 annual report, Kunstmuseum Den Haag writes that, with support from the Erik Bos Fonds, it acquired 341 photographs by Besnyö. The 2025 annual report states that the collection subsequently consisted of 373 objects.

In the run-up to the exhibition, the museum also carried out research. The 2025 annual report states that staff conducted contextual research into Besnyö’s life and work. This kind of research is necessary not only to show photographs as individual images, but also to place them in their time, within the history of photography and in the circumstances in which they were made.

Besnyö was born in 1910 and died in 2003. She became an important photographer in the Netherlands, with work dating back to her years in Berlin and Hungary. The collection of the Hague museum includes photographs from Berlin, Hungary, Paris and the Netherlands, among other places.

The new presentation makes visible how museums build their collections and subsequently reinterpret them. A donation or purchase is not the endpoint: registration, restoration, research and public programmes all help determine the meaning the material acquires. The acquisition of Besnyö’s photographs therefore produces not only an exhibition, but also a lasting expansion of the photographic collection.

For visitors, the exhibition offers an introduction to a photographer who can easily be reduced in the public memory to one or a few images. The museum says it wants to present a broader picture of her work. The exhibition is thus a presentation of existing work, not a new discovery or a reappraisal that has already been scientifically established.

The exhibition fits within the wider role of the The Hague Photography Museum as a place where photography is collected, researched and made accessible. The precise meaning visitors attach to the works remains up to them; the museum mainly provides the organisation, context and access to the material.

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