Hungarian photography from WWII to the 1970s by Klára Szarka
(trans.: Vera Bakonyi-Tánczos)
World War II (1939–1945)
In the course of the nearly six years of the world war, the earlier tendencies continued mostly unaltered in the Hungarian photography scene – to the extent that the state of affairs made it possible. Nevertheless, due to the anti-Jewish laws,[1] many found themselves in a difficult or even impossible situation. A good example of the Horthy system’s absurd attitude to the Jews is the life of László Várkonyi, one of the most prominent photographers. He was the photographer at the wedding of István Horthy (deputy-governor), who was regarded as ‘crown prince’ at the time. It was the same Várkonyi who had already been condemned on a racial basis by the Second Anti-Jewish Act of the Hungarian Parliament and soon had to go into hiding to save his life.
As long as the circumstances permitted, trade journals and professional books got published, and club life was carried on by amateur artists. Jenő Dulovits was considered to be the master of beautiful photographs. In his 1940 book Művészi fényképezés [Artistic Photography],[2] he outlined a principle: it was almost an obligatory requirement to achieve the possibly most beautiful, photo-like spectacle, exploiting the available technical assets to their fullest potential. In addition, his technical developments were also significant: several inventions, like the soft effect screen lens, and other camera developments from both before and after the war are connected to his name. In 1943 he patented a single lens, miniature reflex camera with pentaprism, eye-level viewfinder, and automatic diaphragm, giving an unreversed upright picture with accurate side framing. It was the revolutionary Duflex. Its manufacturing did not begin because of the war, and, unfortunately, there was no quantity production even afterward. Although the other formative photographer of the era, Ernő Vadas, was a very different person both in terms of his ideologies and his Jewish origins, from the aesthetic point of view they had more in common than different. József Németh, who cooperated with Jenő Dulovits as a photographer, was a technical inventor and a publisher as well.[3] Photographers with more modern approaches as well as the school of social documentary photography and the avant-garde photo composition had almost entirely been marginalized by this time. Károly Escher was active during the years of war (as well as before and after), just as ‘the frenzied reporter,’ Sándor Bojár, who was a determining figure in the Hungarian press for long decades.
The 1950s
Following World War II, it was not easy to start anew, due to the significant war damage. The professional artists lived among harsh circumstances. The journalists found jobs at the reopening papers or the news and photo agencies organized around the parties.
The era known as ’the 1950s’ started already around the end of 1948 and ended in 1956. Because of the robust political actions against the private sector, many gave up their independence: all the major studios and livelihoods were nationalized, while most of the leading photographers were forced to join the Magyar Fotó Állami Vállalat (MFÁV – Hungarian Photo State Company). The MFÁV offered photo agency and photographer services until 1956, when its still operating successor, the photo department of the Magyar Távirati Iroda (MTI – Hungarian News Agency), the MTI-Fotó was founded.
As it can be seen in the few photographic publications of the 1950s, photos primarily served the political struggle, in accordance with the expectations of the official cultural politics. Thus, the use of prearranged pictures for photojournalism was also an accepted creative method. The ideology made its way into the photographic genres too: stills, landscapes, and nudes became undesirable, the avant-garde was objectionable, as well as documentary photography, of course, which depicted social criticism. However, not considering the topics, the successful and accepted pictures of the 1950s present the same visual solutions we saw earlier in the works of the followers of the Hungarian style.
Despite all these obstacles, the MFÁV turned into a kind of creative educational photography workshop, thanks to the nationalized senior masters. For the new generation of photographers – Károly Gink, Éva Keleti, Edit Molnár, Endre Friedmann, among others – Ernő Vadas, Zoltár Seidner, Marian Reisman, Klára Langer and the other ’nationalized’ artists constituted the professional model. At that time only a few photojournalists worked with the lightweight, miniature cameras, and the young ones literally carried the heavy bags of their masters.
The government considered Hungarian success in sports its own success, so being a sports photographer offered great opportunities for a journalist. Képes Sport [Picture Sport], the leading sports paper of the era, presented the world-class works of József Széchenyi, Tibor Komlós, and the younger ones, László Almási, László Petrovics, József Farkas, and Károly Hemző.
In the most significant weeklies, the photo-only reports on current events usually got one column, rarely a double page, and they received more than that only in exceptional cases. In most of those exceptional cases, it was János Reismann, the ’star journalist’ of the era, who was published in larger coverage with his otherwise extraordinary, high quality, and state-of-art photo compositions.[4] His younger sister, Marian Reismann, opened a new chapter with children photography, and she became a prominent figure in photography education. Her husband, Dr. Ernő Vajda was also an excellent Hungarian photographer and a botanist.[5]
Interestingly, the club life organized among amateur artists did not change in essence. It might even have gotten back to its feet faster than any other area of photography. The remission that followed the death of Stalin started to manifest itself in photography slowly, but it resulted in the 1953 foundation of the new, photojournalist department of the Magyar Újságírók Országos Szövetsége (Association of Hungarian Journalists), and three years later, in the summer of 1956, the foundation of the Magyar Fotóművészek Szövetsége (MFSZ – Association of Hungarian Photographers).
Many photographers took part in the uprising of 1956, the historical closure of the 1950s era, most of them as chroniclers. The history of the Hungarian photography was rewritten by the wave of emigration: “the majority of the photographers was driven out by the repressed revolution, the resulting measures, the economic and not least the moral impossibility of their existence, not the feeling of being directly threatened. The photographer association . . . suffered a heavy loss. . . . Similarly, the photo editorial office of the Magyar Fotó (a bit later the MTI) became deserted as well,”[6] and several other significant artists, theoreticians, and intellectuals left the country. Many of those who stayed had to face being silenced, imprisoned or unemployed.
The 1960s
In October 1960, the preamble (signed by MFSZ) of the catalog for a photography exhibition held in Ernst Museum[7] included the self-critical notion that there were no truly extraordinary works presented. The new, more modern approach found its way with difficulty. It was evident that the actual ideologists of the Party would continue to decide on every important question. If someone wanted to achieve anything as an artist, they had to make their own smaller or bigger deals with the authorities, and it made the operations of the cultural scene even more complicated. Due to the inherited distinctions – often antagonism – between professionals and amateurs, as well as reporters and artists, usually there was always a group that tried to appropriate professional leadership: the MSZF, clubs, journalists, studio artists sometimes worked together, sometimes against each other, making different ’alliances.’ The unspoken personal differences and the attempts to take control hide behind ideological, political, or aesthetic disguises in Hungarian photography – even today. However, the professional leadership did not only mean a political but also a significant financial support (covering operational costs, providing offices, employees, and opportunities for travel as well as publishing) for the organization or group preferred by the state.
Photography did not become an integral part of the Hungarian artistic life. The lack of university art education – and a resulting universal professional illiteracy, – together with the truly dominant conservative view[8] and the ideological brakes that slowed down the artistic renewal, resulted in the more or less deserved second-class position of Hungarian photography. Yet, the global tendencies increasingly made their way to the country in the 1960s. Almost all members of the younger generation wanted to be photojournalists. However, the conservative approach represented by the amateur photo clubs also gained ground; moreover, it enjoyed considerable state support. “Within the framework of an organized amateur movement, it was easier to monitor, influence, and control the experimenting citizen than in any other way.”[9] Still, the avant-garde artists of the opposition were also in connection with the amateur movement and the MFSZ as well. After 1956, photojournalists had a much larger – although relative – freedom in choosing and shaping their topics. However, photojournalists remained second class employees of the Hungarian newspapers for long decades to come. The leaders of the newspapers cared little about the photos; they did not indeed know what to do with them, and there were no photo editors at all. Still, some new talents with a fresh approach ‒ like Demeter Balla, Tamás Féner, Irén Ács, or the aforementioned Károly Hemző sports photographer ‒ appeared at the weeklies.
From the mid-1960s a real cultural buzz started in photography as well. In the cultic downtown coffee-bars, like Muskátli, or Kvint, the innovators of different artistic areas gathered, and the photographers joined them. In the Építők Műszaki Klubja [Builder’s Engineering Club],[10] in 1965, there was a photo exhibition of three artists, Csaba Koncz, György Lőrinczy, which later became almost legendary.[11] The three artists of different views and habitudes were brought together by their refusal of the centrally enforced taste. Zoltán Nagy soon left the country, and so did Csaba Koncz. Koncz even abandoned photography. For Lőrinczy, however, photography remained significant in his whole life, both as a creative field of expression and as the subject of his theoretical interest.
The next neo-avant-garde event was the 1967 Műhely ’67 exhibition in Debrecen,[12] where László Balogh, Magda B. Müller, István Dárday, István Horváth, Endre Rácz, Jr., Csaba Koncz, György Lőrinczy, Tibor Shopper, Zsolt Szabóky, and Gyula Tahin took part. Sándor Szilágyi, a researcher of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, wrote the following about this phenomenon: “In Eastern and Central Europe, the artists had to face the more elemental and brute facts of the lies and the lack of freedom. . . . [I]n these parts of the world, the artists also used a language that is more raw and lifelike. Here a work of art was not a piece of home decoration or an investment and not even an elegant rebellion against these; it was a personal statement, an ideological credo.”[13] However, the joint photographic work could not continue. Thus, for example, László Haris, who belonged to the younger generation and who had chosen the field of experimental photography because of Lőrinczy’s influence, found a creative community through his friendship with the artist Attila Csányi and became a representative of art and not photography at the neo-avant-garde exhibition titled Szürenon in 1969.
Zoltán Berekméri or Gyula Holics carried out their creative work in an innovative way, almost entirely independent from everybody else. Berekméri’s genre pictures, landscapes, and stills have no spiritual or stylistic relationship with the club style of his age. Gyula Holics became a professional graphic illustrator from an amateur photographer already by the end of the 1950s. His works – just like the works of Berekméri – are almost timeless; he is not connected to the spirit of his era, rather, to the avant-garde of the 1930s.
The landscapes and stills started to gain ground again slowly; even nude pictures were acceptable at exhibitions and contests. By the end of the 1960s, as the standard of living was rising, fashion and advertisement images started to appear as well. On the pages of the photo journals and at the professional forums it became more and more acceptable to mention those great Hungarian photographers who had been forbidden to talk about, and the world opened up for the Hungarian photographers as the ideological control also became somewhat more liberal.
In 1958 the Photo-Historic and Museological Committee of MFSZ was established, which had tried for long decades to collect, preserve and present the relics of the Hungarian history of photography, thus building the foundations of Hungarian photo-museology. Since there was not a museum of photography or a university research center, the photo archives of the Hungarian National Museum played an important role in collecting photographs and performing research in the history of photography.
Under the entry photography, the Esztétikai Kislexikon [Encyclopedia of Aesthetics] published at the end of the decade, the author still had to assert that photography is equal to the other forms of art, even though this was not universally accepted in Hungary.[14] Only the next decade, the 1970s brought some changes in this regard.
[1] Act XXV of 1920, commonly referred to as numerus clauses, limited the enrollment of people of Jewish origins into universities on an ethnic basis. This legislation was followed by the so-called First Anti-Jewish Act, namely, Act XV of 1938, and Act IV of 1939, that is, the Second Anti-Jewish Act. The latter determined the definition of Jewish on a racial basis, and limited or excluded those considered Jews from certain areas. The Third Anti-Jewish Act, Act XV of 1941, gave way for even more racial discrimination. After the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star, and soon the Jewish population was forced into ghettos. In May their deportation to work camps and extermination camps was started.
[2] Dulovits, Jenő. Művészi fényképezés [Artistic Photography]. Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda [Royal Hungarian University Press], 1940.
[3] Németh was the designer of the Duflex camera.
[4] Szarka, Klára. A Kádár-kor Új Tükörben [The Kádár Era in Új Tükör (New Mirror)]. Manuscript.
[5] Kincses, Károly. A két Reismann [The Two Reismanns]. Kecskemét: Hungarian Museum of Photography, 2004.
[6] Kincses, Károly. “1956 hordaléka, Hungarian Out (3. rész) [The Alluvium of 1956. Hungarian Out (Chapter 3)].” Fotóművészet [Photograhic Art] (2011/4).
[7] Open to the public from October 15 through November 12 in 1960, the exhibition was organized by MFSZ from their own works of the previous 15 years.
[8] András Bán accurately calls this “scholastic realism.” In Bán, András, editor. Fotográfozásról [About Photographing]. Budapest: Múzsák, 1982.
[9] Schwanner, Endre and Klára Szarka. “Társasági rovat 1./ A Népművelési Intézet fotós programjai [Social Column 1 / Photography events of the Institute for People’s Education].” Fotóművészet [Photographic Art] (2008/1).
[10] The clubs of the Party’s youth organization, the Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség (Hungarian Young Communist League), were often the terrain for the oppositional culture, clearly marking the ambivalence of the Kádár era.
[11] In 1995, in the Budapest Gallery, one of the most prestigious exhibition spaces of the capital, the original exhibition was organized again.
[12] The exhibition was scheduled for the period of the summer university; it could be visited between July 20 and August 10, because then lots of students would gather there from all over the world to learn the Hungarian language.
[13] Szilágyi, Sándor. Neoavantgárd tendenciák a magyar fotóművészetben, 1965–1984. [Neo-avant-garde trends in Hungarian photo arts, 1965–1984]. Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó, 2007. 13.
[14] Szigeti, József, editor. Esztétikai kislexikon [Encyclopedia of Aesthetics]. Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó, 1969. 120.