Károly Kincses
A Country from Photographs
Why Hungary? Why history? Why photography?

Introduction

If someone were to set himself the impossible task of getting to know a country in detail - its regions, its settlements, its people, everything that has befallen them and so forth, he could be sure that even were he to devote his whole life to the task, he could never achieve his goal. Because the more someone sees and the more knowledge he acquires, the more keenly he discerns that all is still hidden from him. It therefore makes sense to curtail our desires, and to sample not everything, but merely a small part of the immensity, in the hope that in one drop of water we shall find the whole sea.

In this daunting enterprise the Hungarian Museum of Photography can assist visitors to the gallery and readers of the catalogue. From its collection of one million photographs it has selected eighty- nine, with the intention of showing something of Hungary’s characteristics, inhabitants and history in the twentieth century. We started out from the assumption that Hungary is an interesting place and that the history of the last century did not treat her in a particularly tender way. Another point of departure was that Hungary has been the birthplace of very many talented photographers: André Kertész, Brassai, László Moholy-Nagy, and Martin Munkácsi to name just a few. And when a country interesting in its own right has many good photographers at work within its borders, we may assume that pictures selected from the very best of their output will not be uninteresting. Anyway, come along and judge for yourselves whether or not I’m right.

Essential information: On Hungary and on what happened to it

When a less known neighbour pays a visit anxious to tell everything that happened to him that day and keen that his listeners understand fully, then he must begin his story some days earlier. I am such a neighbour.

Territorially speaking, the Hungarians found themselves a somewhat over-frequented location when Europe was shared out at towards the end of the first millennium A.D. Threading their way through a few high passes and defiles, this equestrian, nomadic people from the northeast seized the whole of the Carpathian Basin, an area forming - then as now - a natural geographical whole. They integrated, killed or enslaved those already living there, as was the general custom at that time. Since then it has been their home. But just as this piece of ground fell along the path of our conquering forebears in the year 896, so, too, did it fall along those of other peoples and countries, which either passed through straightaway or else stayed a while before moving on. These paths were never tranquil tourist trails, and much blood flowed at the points along them. We call this our history, in the absence of anything better. Those who stayed for shorter or longer periods - they include the Tatars, the Turks, the Habsburgs, and the soldiers of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev - were occupiers. The brushes with them - the peace agreements, collaborations and confrontations - are, may I say, more than enough to fill the history textbooks of Hungarian schoolchildren. In the meantime we took photographs, sometimes well, sometimes not very many, but in a couple of periods sensationally.

Essential information: On Hungarian photography

The year 1839 is a uniformly important date for all nations dealing with photography. This was the time when particular discoveries, inventions and technical developments came together; this was the time that discoverers travelling different paths met up, afterwards to proceed in tandem. The principle of the camera obscura, known from Antiquity; knowledge from the eighteenth century of the light sensitivity of various metallic salts; and developments in optics together resulted in the birth of photography. This everyone knows; it’s a pity to waste words on it. More important is that the discovery of photography, which occurred as a coming together of findings in physics, chemistry and optics, in a certain sense steered experience of things happening in the world onto a common path, along with our remembrance of them. In Hungary, Great Britain and Kamchatka alike we can thank the photograph for a new kind of thinking, a new kind of seeing, a same-level treatment of things that has happened and that were just happening, and many other things besides.

On this abovementioned common path there are threads running in parallel over longer or shorter stretches along with substantial meanderings and divergences, since the history of photography is inseparable from the personal (private) histories of photographers and the histories of the countries regarding them as their citizens. I shall now tell you about this thread (here and there colourful, distinctive and individual but elsewhere an ordinary grey), the joint story of Hungarian photography and Hungarian history, showing pictures to illustrate these.

As everywhere is somewhere, in Hungary, too, photography was invented in 1839. Here also - and we wouldn’t be Hungarians if we didn’t believe this - we led the world. It is a fact that there is a letter written by the brilliant Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyai, then studying at Göttingen but resident in Transylvania, to a friend on 21 February 1839. In this we find the following: “The fixing of a camera obscura picture is a lovely invention: no sooner was it announced than I declared it impossible in colour. But now I am promising to fix a negative in black and they have said that it will remain only dark. The idea is beautiful and its perfection is to be expected, along with great consequences.” After what was still only the announcement of the invention in Paris (the precise description of it occurred only in the August of that year), we may assume that Bolyai did in fact experiment with photography on hearing news of the breakthrough. Since nothing has survived of the whole thing except the letter, the matter is, naturally, of news value only. From this time onwards, as elsewhere in the world, there were more and more daguerreotype- and calotype-photographers working in Hungary, which was then an integral part of the Habsburg Empire. Of these photographers we may mention the Hungarian professor József Petzval, who worked out and then made the first high-power lens in 1840, thus making possible the shortening of exposure times, which had hitherto lasted minutes. Subsequently, it was through lenses of this type that British photographers saw the world. One of the members of Scotland’s Photographic Society in August 1856 was a certain Iván Szabó. He was, of course, a Hungarian émigré who had fought in the 1848-49 revolution and war of independence. He went on to open a calotype studio in Edinburgh, at 4 Salisbury Place, in 1857. He photographed Fox Talbot and his latter’s family, and exhibited together with David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. But these are just episodes.

The first truly important period in Hungarian photography came around the turn of the twentieth century, when Hungarian photographers working in the pictorialist style already featured in exhibitions alongside the world’s best: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Puyo, Demachy, and Hugo Erfurth. In the catalogue and in the exhibition, too, we show some of those who deserve greater attention on the part of the world because their work enriched not only Hungarian, but universal photographic art as well. With their pictures, Angelo, Olga Máté, József Pécsi, József Schermann, and László A. Székely contributed to the evolution of photography, hitherto used largely for purposes of documentation, into a real art. It was masters such as these who inspired the generation that afterwards made Hungarian photography known worldwide. In the first third of the twentieth century an important part in the development and communication of photography’s language of forms was played by a number of Hungarian photographer-artists approaching the photograph from different standpoints (these included László Moholy-Nagy, Brassai and György Kepes) and by photographers pure and simple (including André Kertész, Martin Munkácsi and Robert Capa). Their role and impact are indisputable: one has only to read the memoirs of Richard Avedon, who regarded Munkácsi as his mentor, or to recall that Cartier- Bresson was prompted to take up photography on seeing Munkácsi’s picture African Boys on the Shores of Lake Tanganyika. No one dealing with photography can be unaware of Melancholy Tulip by Kertész or of Death of a Militiaman by Capa, or of the pictures in the Paris by Night series by Brassai. These photographers all emigrated from the Hungary of the time, primarily for political reasons or else sensing the imminent fascist danger. This wave of émigrés cast a few important photographers ashore in Great Britain also. Examples were Mihály Pető, a major press photographer almost all of whose oeuvre is now kept at the University of Dundee; Dezső Hoffman, the Beatles’ house photographer; István Lóránt, editor of Weekly Illustrated, then of Picture Post and the founder of Lilliput; Zoltán Glass; György Fayer; and György Friedmann. And then there were the abovementioned László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes and Robert Capa… The list is long. And we have still not touched upon Andor Kraszna- Krausz, the brilliant photographer who founded the largest publishing house dealing with photography, Focal Press. A foundation bearing his name continues to award an annual prize for the most beautiful book of photographs.

Of course, there were also highly talented photographers who stayed in Hungary. These, too, merit attention; I shall mention a few of them. Rudolf Balogh is considered the father of Hungarian press photography, and Károly Escher a pupil who eventually outshone him. An important figure in the process known as the Hungarian style is Tibor Csörgeö; likewise worthy of note is Klára Langer, a photographer sensitive to social issues. The list could continue, but the walls of the exhibition room lack space for more photographs. So I ask you to believe me when I say that we Hungarians have not forgotten how to take photographs; in fact we have storerooms full of works by unknown but very good photographers. And our storerooms are open to all well-intentioned visitors.