HUNGARIAN PROGRESSIVE ART PHOTOGRAPHY 1965–2000 by Sándor Szilágyi, PhD
(trans.: Vera Bakonyi-Tánczos)
This period essentially covers two eras: the neo-avant-garde (1965–1984) and the new-wave (1981–2000).[1] It is evident from the dates that one style did not turn into the other overnight, but they coexisted for a good half of a decade: their representatives had joint exhibitions, while their artworks appeared in the same catalogs and professional journals.
THE PERIOD OF THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE (1965–1984)
The beginning of the neo-avant-garde dates relatively late, about half a decade later compared to Poland,[2] for example, and for about ten years it was practiced by only a few artists. The year marking the beginning of the period denotes the appearance of only three young men: it was the exhibition of Csaba Koncz, György Lőrinczy, and Zoltán Nagy on March 5, 1965, at the Építők Műszaki Klubja [Club of Architects], which made many people feel that something had finally stirred! For over two (!) years, it went like this: these three young men really stirred and set the, so to speak, 19th-century image concept of Hungarian photography in motion, introducing an up-to-date, modern, abstract, non-representational, non-artsy, but a creative and thought-provoking approach to photography.
The First Generation
Zoltán Nagy was the youngest among the three: at the time of the exhibition, he was only 22 years old. He had a peculiar talent for purging the third dimension from his photographic images. His landscapes look more like painted settings than photographically captured actual sceneries. However, Nagy did not yet surpass the photographic vision in general. He emigrated in 1967, first to Germany, and then to Italy (where he lives today), and he became a not too original photojournalist.
Csaba Koncz was not even actually a photographer but a hippie, who wrote poems, played the flute, created short films, and therewith took photographs as well. Koncz’s photos look like graphical objects, or rather, Japanese ink drawings: albeit all he did was take pictures of machine parts, springs, and bolts found in the snow, or lay a window-pane on the back of two chairs and photograph his subjects through the glass while pointing his camera towards the sky. Because the film is more sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum, in both cases the background became clear white as it is in the drawing-paper. In addition, Koncz used another tool of camera syntax[3] as well: the selective blur and peculiar tracing of the lens with a wide open diaphragm, set at a single point focus – something that cannot be achieved with any other imaging device (brush, charcoal, or lead). Koncz also emigrated in 1967: he left through Yugoslavia to the Netherlands, but he gave up on photography, only to become an early representative of world music with his flute.
The most serious member of the trio, both in terms of art and intellect, is György Lőrinczy, who wrote theoretical articles as well beyond his photographic work, and who was a tireless organizer of this photography of the new approach. He also tried to get as far as possible from the representational, banal function of photography – which he achieved best in his series Ragacsok / Stickies made in 1966–67. These photographs are close-ups of oil or glue drops put between microscope slides, photographic images that evoke strange, non-existent creatures. As opposed to the geometric abstract approach of Zoltán Nagy, Csaba Koncz’s and especially György Lőrinczy’s work can be characterized by a kind of organic, natural abstract approach.
Thanks to Lőrinczy’s organizational efforts, the monumental exhibition titled Műhely ‘67 [Workshop ‘67] was showcased in Debrecen, as a muster of the new (at least new in Hungary) abstract and non-figurative approach to photography. The show, which presented the work of eleven photographers, stirred some dust, but this dust vanished into thin air: there was no continuance of the exhibition. Zoltán Nagy left the country some months before the exhibition, while Csaba Koncz followed his example soon after. György Lőrinczy retired from the public life of photography and stopped writing theoretical articles and organizing exhibitions. Although he published a photo book titled New York, New York[4] in 1972, – the quality of which has not been matched until 1990 at all, and only rarely since then, – still, in 1973, he emigrated, too: he went to New York through Germany, and he died there in 1981 at the age of 46.
The Second Generation
Thus, the first generation of the neo-avant-garde photography was scattered: its most prominent representatives emigrated, and the other artists of the Műhely ’67 exhibition did not have the power or the talent to continue what they had begun. So the second generation of the neo-avant-garde approach, the members of which were born around 1945, was at first represented by merely two lonesome photographers: László Haris, starting from 1967, and László Török, from 1972. At the beginning they had no one to bond with in the photography scene; they did not even know each other for years.
László Haris, who is an engineer by profession, has found a community that accepted and inspired his works amongst artists, the members of the surrealist and non-figurative group called Szürenon [Sur et Non]. At first, he created organic, abstract photos resembling Lőrinczy’s work, then he came up with a unique art form: scale-up abstraction. He made macro photos of certain tiny details of his artist friends’ paintings or graphics, and he produced a so-called meter-sized enlargement[5] of these photographs, which was unusually large in that era in art photography. The most beautiful of these is probably his work called Madár / Bird (1969), which was a 2×1 meter large photograph enlarged from a few centimeters’ section of Attila Csáji’s relatively small, about 40 x 30 centimeters large oil painting Idolok / Idols.
Haris was one of the founders of the Balatonboglári Kápolnatárlatok [Chapel Exhibitions at Balatonboglár], where he presented his mural photos representing the same concept. In the meantime, and also following the closing of the chapel, he created actions: events and happenings where one of the main roles was played by the photographs of Haris, created especially for the event – these usually were enlargements of 1:1 aspect ratio, on Dokubrom photographic paper. These photographic works had a definite role in art criticism: on the one hand, they recalled, even substituted ‘reality,’ while at the same time they hided it as well.
Haris also created two extraordinary artworks in the so-called sequence, the most important genre of the neo-avant-garde. The Jel és Árnyék / Sign and Shadow (1975) was made in a quarry, where Haris and his artist friends used wire cables to brace up a large black sheet, and Haris took images of it on the almost vertical wall of the quarry from dawn till dusk. Haris worked for two years on a haiku-like poem to the sequence consisting of nine pictures:[6] ‘The Sign floats over you, motionless. Its Shadow on the Earth changes continually, from place to place, from time to time. If you watch the shadow, you will learn something about the Sign, but this knowledge must always be modified. If you watch the Sign, you will learn everything.’
His other best-known work in sequential form has the prosaic title 1975. VI. 5. / 5 June 1975. In this, Haris documented the events of a single day, 24 hours, by taking images of a busy square from the window of a friend; using his stopwatch, he took a picture in every third minute with his camera equipped with an automatic light meter and mounted on a tripod. Then he organized the 480 photographs made into 24 rows (the 24 hours) and into 20 columns (the sixty minutes of each). The final product was a 135 x 182 centimeter-large tableau, on which we can follow the temporal changes of the day’s events – and at the same time this can be interpreted as if the whole 24 hours had been documented as a still.[7]
László Török also did not find his photopoetic style among photographers but rather among poets: around the table of poet Jenő Balaskó in the Kárpátia Pub. Török has been considered to be the best-known representative of staged photography in Hungary; almost all of his works were created in this genre. His first emblematic masterpiece, A család / The Family (1972), is, on the one hand, a criticism of the Socialist family model, while on the other hand it also questions the role of the photographer. The figure of the naked girl, which will be present all through his oeuvre, appears already here, fulfilling a similar role for Török as in the movies of the acclaimed director, Miklós Jancsó: the allegory of Freedom and Purity. Before 1990 (not considering Lőrinczy’s guide about New York), he was the only person to publish a photo book, titled Módosulások [Modifications].[8]
Artists Using Photographs
From the beginning of the 1970s, the representatives of fine arts and other associated art forms preferred using photographs as an artistic medium. Let us mention them only in brief because the reader can get more than enough information about them from the writings of Piotrowski and others.
Miklós Erdély used photography for his conceptual art; he himself never took the camera in his hand, and he especially did not enlarge pictures (he asked his two sons and acquaintances to do this for him), but he still had devised the greatest works of conceptual photography. Tamás Szentjóby criticized the elitist nature of art with his works made confirming to the fluxus, while Géza Perneczky condemned the phenomenon of the l’art pour l’art by using different reflections of the word ‘art.’ Both the painters Ákos Birkás and Zsigmond Károlyi examined the social role of the museum, even if in different ways. Gábor Attalai went beyond criticizing the role of the artist and questioned the validity of the Socialist ideals. Gyula Pauer examined the relationship between text and image, while Dóra Maurer looked at the verbal interpretability of a single picture, several pictures, a series of photographs, or a sequence of photographs, and so on. Imre Bak experimented with the visual representations of Zen philosophy with his reflection-based photographic works, while András Baranyay approached existential philosophy along the same lines via his self-portraits ‘ruined’ by motions and scribbles. Károly Halász created his own world around himself by so to speak ‘climbing into’ the television; the telling title of the series is Privát adás / Private Transmission. The disturbing and shocking performances of Tibor Hajas were documented by several photographers; however in his body art pieces which were specifically designed for photographic representation (that is, were not performed in front of an audience), his co-creator was János Vető photographer.
The Third Generation
The third generation of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde did not consist of lonesome characters; it was rather made up of smaller and larger groups, which even enjoyed support during the middle and at the end of the 1970s from the institutions established to aid (and to control) the artistic initiatives of the youth.[9]
The most talented member of this generation was Gábor Kerekes. At this time, Kerekes stood out from the photographer community by his use of unique raw materials and methods (ORWO PF2 Positive film, pinhole camera, motion blur). His pictures –on which we can see desolate factory buildings, outskirt streets, a blurred bridge, a swing in movement, a deserted yard and things like that– spoke about a kind of cosmic loneliness: as if they were frames from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979). He created his most important work titled Május 1. / May Day (1984) during this period, shot from a balcony with a shutter camera turned into a camera obscura: the cheering crowd –forced to march, actually– appears blurred, like an amorphous mass in a giant cloaca.[10]
A very important and central force of the generation was János Szerencsés. Along with the originator Antal Jokesz, he is credited with the organization of the Dokumentum [Document] exhibitions in Veszprém (1989-1982), while he also coordinated the Önkioldó 1. and 2. [Self-Timer 1 and 2] exhibitions (1983, 1984) with László Beke art historian and Károly Kincses photo museologist. In addition, Szerencsés created one of the most subtle but verbally hardly approachable photographic oeuvres – even if his oeuvre, or at least its autonomous part created with an artistic purpose, would only fill a very slender volume.[11] His photographic artworks are seemingly full of banality, but still: there is some mysterious threat vibrating in all of them.
Antal Jokesz is a real match for the above-mentioned members of his generation. He was the initiator and Szerencsés’s partner in organizing the Dokumentum [Document] exhibitions, and in designing, editing and publishing the associated newspaper-catalogs. Besides, Jokesz was one of the most radical analysts of the photographic grammar of documentary photography –especially regarding the issues of camera syntax– not only via his pictures but his writings as well. Although his related book titled A preparált idő nyomában [In Search of Prepared Time] was published only in 1999, long after the images had been taken,[12] it can still be considered the most detailed and authentic conceptualization of the mediated problems of neo-avant-garde photography in Hungarian. Back then, Jokesz created tension among photojournalists and documentary photographers with his snapshot photographs –taking images without looking into the viewfinder of the camera– which challenged their ranking as ‘creators.’ After all, these images demonstrated that in photography the most important imaging element is chance (however directed it shall be), not conscious decisions, not to mention preliminary aesthetic intentions.
Although he was a photographer both by profession and by livelihood, János Vető was still not most at home among photographers but among artists. His name also hallmarks lots of experiments in the photographic expression, together with a peculiar behavior or rather, attitude: being easygoing. It was an unusual thing in the neo-avant-garde, while basically an essential element in the new-wave, so this makes Vető the forerunner of the later one. Of utmost importance are his printing artifices, which consist of three or four partial photographs that constitute the photographic image, for example, a portrait, that we are used to – just to raise the question: what are we actually used to? His joint works with Tibor Hajas can be traced back to these experiments, or studies, of his. His most important solo works are the conceptual self-portraits, like the Nyitva-csukva / Open/Closed (1976) or the Önportré kölcsön testrészekkel / Self-Portrait with Loaned Body Parts, and the Dal Európáért / Song for Europe (both from 1978), which also raise the issue of gender.[13]
THE PERIOD OF THE NEW-WAVE (1981–2000)
The October 1981 issue of the periodical Mozgó Világ [Moving World] included an article on Lenke Szilágyi by András Forgách. The style of the article, as well as the attached images, made it clear for everyone: a new era had started in Hungarian photography. In essence, this is when the fourth generation of Hungarian progressive photography, born shortly after the revolution of 1956, made its entry.[14]
Lenke Szilágyi is the most accomplished representative of the subjective documentary photography. She exclusively photographs herself and her immediate environment of her friends –the ‘hooligans’ as she calls them– seemingly with no particular purpose. Her pictures do not have a ‘message,’ they merely exist – just as their author and subjects are drifting in the world. The only objective of creating her images is that they exist as images. And strong images they are, which dazzle and call upon the viewer – but not because that is their purpose, quite the reverse: by being natural and straightforward. Lenke’s way of taking photographs is seemingly so self-evident as the song of a bird – before her, only André Kertész could make the world believe this. Her preference for using the language of photographic errors also makes her the successor to László Moholy-Nagy.[15] For example, she often takes photos counter-light, against the sun or other light sources, which results in that only the contours of her subjects remain – however, this intended ‘error’ makes the image itself as compelling as a cave painting.
The Metamorphoses of the Female Body
In line with the ‘new sensitivity,’ the poet and rock singer, Zsuzsi Ujj, created a kind of body art that was very bold and subtly hiding at the same time, virtually continuing the Hungarian history of body art from where it was drastically interrupted by the fatal ended car accident of Tibor Hajas. On the one hand, this led to very powerful, provocative art punk images, evoking death, blood, and violence, for example, the Trónusos / With a Throne, Sarok repülős / Flying II or the Esküvős / Wedding (all three from 1986). The visual effect of the images is so strong even today that many (including one of the gallerists of the artist) mistakenly believe that Zsuzsi Ujj shows her naked body in these images. As a matter of fact, however, it is a skeleton painted on her garb, or the painted dots placed over her nipples and lap what lend the power to these images via their symbolism. The other type of her images does show quite a bit of Zsuzsi Ujj’s body with the help of different mirrors, but these mirrors make the picture so fragmented that it is exactly the image of the naked body that is never aggregated. This is a very subtle and pudent revelation.[16]
Around this time some male photographers also reinterpreted the genre of the female nude. The model in György Tóth’s image, the Akt kísérlet / Nude Experiment (1982) is mauling her groins, while the model in an image with the same title from a year earlier pulls back her two arms, quasi making a torso of herself. In both images, one can almost hear the instructions of the photographer.[17] Zsolt Péter Barta made her model do similar tricks in his series Fotóbalett / Photo Ballet. (Actually, the model was his wife, a professional rhythmic gymnastics trainer.) All this resulted in peculiar photographic images: mostly ones where the body of the model appeared crumpled (Fotóbalett 1 / Photo Ballet 1, 1986, Fotóbalett 5 / Photo Ballet 5, 1987), but less frequently there was the opposite effect too: as if the body had been pulled apart, or expanded (Kréta / Crete, 1988).[18]
Punk and Neo-Dada
The spirit of the 1980s was most efficiently evoked by the Eastern European absurd imagery of Attila Vécsy (Atika) and Bálint Flesch, besides the outsider spleen attitude of Lenke Szilágyi. The new-wave pictures of Vécsy reflect a kind of punk sentiment: a total disillusionment. Such is for example the thrilling self-portrait titled A jövő biztos és szép [Certain and Beautiful is the Future] (1982), where the ‘outside world’ is depicted by the concrete walls of a nuclear-proof safe-deposit, or the picture titled Új hullám / New Wave (1981), in which he is hanged by his feet next to his pretty spouse. Similarly nightmarish visions appear in his color pictures as well, which were taken of the cement factory and housing project of Ajka (1980) – compared to these, the factory images of Kerekes mentioned above are syrupy, tourist-alluring postcards. Vécsy’s total disillusionment radiates through even those of his images in which he just plays and fools around: such is his series titled XEX, the color photographs of which are about love, sex (a distortion of which brought about the title), and kisses – and the picture elements of which Vécsy stitched together by a red thread.
The contemporary images of Bálint Flesch present a similar punk, or rather, neo-dada philosophy, the genuine faith in the absolute nonsense of life. Basically the same concept is in the background of Flesch’s two series, the Nagy, meleg, rózsaszín / Big, Warm, Pink (1982) and the Hideg, ragacsos dolgok / Cold, Sticky Things (1984): the scenes of extremely disgusting content are presented in almost kitschy beauty and perfect form. But we can also turn the thing around: he convinces beautiful models to do unpleasant things for the picture. One of them, for example, is asked to dangle one of her breasts into a bowl of tomato soup. Flesch considered the installation of the images to be part of the artwork: the pictures at the Big, Warm, Pink exhibition were framed by cotton-wool dyed pink, with a thick layer of smelly intimate spray from the DDR.[19]
Alternative, Historical, and Artisan Photographic Techniques
Between 1985 and 1990, Bálint Flesch and Károly Kincses held a one-week camp about on history of photography in the community center of Gödöllő, which aimed at learning about and trying different photographic techniques. This is probably the reason for that these techniques are still practiced today in Hungary by many more artists than in the surrounding countries – moreover, they are not only utilized by amateurs only! Let us look at some examples, which partly take us over into the 1990s as well.
– photogram: One of the pictures of Ágnes Eperjesi was created by her covering herself in developer from head to toe, and then doing a tumble roll on a 1 meter wide and 2 meters long photographic paper (1988). In her series titled Újszülöttek / Newborns (1996), she created photograms of 18 newborn babies, and installed the images in metal frames.[20] Aliona Frankl created a very sweet, fairy-tale world for herself (and of course for us), filled with angels, tiny creatures, stars, vials and other things.[21]
– camera obscura: Balázs Telek, who died tragically young at the age of 41, bended and folded space with the help of his self-constructed cameras, cones, and boxes, just to smooth it out again.[22] In his series Downtown (1995), András Bozsó set an imaginary environment on small platens in front of emblematic buildings of Budapest.[23] Enikő Gábor invented a peculiar camera obscura: she used the holes on the closed shutters of her room for the images of her Camera reluxa series (2000).[24]
– putting emulsion on paper, stone, skin, etc.: These works of Enikő Gábor can be found on her website under Faktúrák [Factures]. Magdolna Vékás has been the most committed follower of the historical and alternative processes since the Gödöllő camps, including the photo-emulsion screen printing process; she has passed on her knowledge to countless of young people as well. The third master of emulsion coating is Károly Minyó Szert,[25] who also invented a new genre in photographic image making, “light-biking”: at the opening of his exhibitions he creates the image in front of the audience with the help of the light of a bicycle put on a stand.
– salt paper print, albumen print, cyanotype, anthrakotype: Besides Vékás, the most diligent user of these in the 1990s was Gábor Kerekes, who had stopped making photographs with an artistic purpose in 1984 for six years,[26] but then returned to artistic life as a committed user of large format cameras and the associated contact copying processes. The second creative period of Kerekes is characterized by a kind of – very serious – role play: he pretended to be a 19th-century naturalist. Moreover, in his study, he went back as far as alchemy! He browsed the warehouses of numerous scientific, medical, anatomical and other museums, enthusiastically photographing old tools and dissections. He contributed very special images with an archaic effect, but speaking to the modern man, many times in a stirring way, for example the Fejmetszet / Head Cut (1993), Kar / Arm (1993), Elefántláb / Elephant Foot (1991), Békák / Frogs (1992), Fekete kő / Black Stone (1992), Kémiai eszköz / Chemical Instrument (1991), and I could go on with the ever more beautiful and unusual images.
This panorama would not be comprehensive without mentioning two other photographers, who used the usual tools but in an unusual way. One of them, Imre Drégely, who is still the brainiest of all our photographers, wishes to put off photography from the petrified practices of camera syntax. For example, he likes using the tool of motion blur – like in his picture titled Körhinta / Carousel (1989), where due to the about 1–2 seconds exposure, the carousel turning around lit in the night leaves a trace on the negative, as if it was a snapshot of a UFO just landing. An even more extreme example is his series started in 1996, T-idő / Time-exposure: in this he captures the annual Hungarian national fireworks of August 20 on a single frame of a photographic paper placed into a camera turned into a pinhole camera, opening the shutter at the beginning of the parade, and closing it in the end, after 30 minutes.[27]
Antal Jama Farkas creates color photographs that look like paintings, as if he had overpainted them. We could say that there is nothing unusual in this: many paint into their photographs for the fine art effect. Yet, Jama does exactly the opposite: he does not overpaint the photograph, but his models, the setting, the background, and so on.[28] These are real postmodern artworks: not only because they play reality and appearance against each other, but due to the evoking of the painting tradition – for example, in Tanguy apó / Father Tanguy (1989), Madame Reynouard (1989), Salföldön ülő akt / Nude Sitting on Salföld (1996). But actually, even this is not necessary: just take a look at the Nyakkendős nő / Woman with Necktie (1988), which is simply a great gag, an artistic and photographic joke – on the highest possible level.[29]
*
Two emblematic images of the neo-avant-garde era directly conceptualize the anhelation these artworks were born into: the desire for freedom. Gábor Attalai’s No Air (1971) reveals it as a sequence, in phases, what a liberating feeling it is when one rips off the patch that is supposed to keep one’s mouth shut. At the same time, László Haris in his work Törvénytelen avantgarde / Illegal Avant-Garde (1971) did the exact opposite: he muffled his graphic artist friend József V. Molnár’s mouth with the newspaper article that was the overture to the press campaign against the Chapel Exhibitions at Balatonboglár. I think both works of art – mutatis mutandis – have the same relevance as back then ̶ just as the artworks created by the artists of progressive photography mentioned (or not mentioned) here.
[1] For a study on the neo-avant-garde era, see Szilágyi, Sándor. Neo-Avant-Garde Trends in Hungarian Art Photography, 1965–1984. Budapest: Art + Text Budapest – Fotókultúra, 2017. [The original Hungarian version was published in 2007.] This monograph will be continued by Sándor Szilágyi: Új hullám a magyar fotóművészetben, 1981–2000 [The New Wave in Hungarian Art Photography, 1981–2000]. (In progress.) See also: Kolozsváry, Marianna, editor. The Freedom of the Past: A Selection from Róbert Alföldi’s Photographic Collection. Budapest: ARTneo – Magyar Fotográfusok Háza [Hungarian House of Photography], 2016.
[2] See Sobota, Adam. Polish Photography – Trends & Developments in the 20th Century. http://culture.pl/en/article/polish-photography-trends-developments-in-the-20th-century. The following compelling large monograph deals with the time-lag and other differences between the two (and other Central-Eastern European) countries: Piotrowski, Piotr. In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. Translated by Anna Brzyski. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. However, it is not very useful for our topic: although it deals with 23 Hungarian artists of the period, with some of them in photographic art context, but none of them is a photographer.
[3] Camera syntax is all the photographic opportunities that derive from the expedient use of the technical characteristics of a shot. The other item of this paired concept is printmaking syntax, which covers all the opportunities that lie in the technical characteristics of copying/enlarging. See: Crawford, William. The Keepers of Light. New York: Morgan & Morgan, 1979, pp. 1–16.
[4] Lőrinczy, György. New York, New York. Budapest: Magyar Helikon, 1972.
[5] It was called so because the enlargement was made to photographic papers that could be bought in one meter wide rolls. Since Haris usually exhibited together with his painter, graphical artist and sculptor friends, it was important for him to show his work in the same size as the works of the others, otherwise they would have been lost in the exhibition space.
[6] Haris sometimes exhibited or published only seven or five photos of the sequence, depending on the available space.
[7] About the works of Haris see: P. Szabó, Ernő. Haris László. Budapest: Hungart, 2013.
[8] Török, László. Módosulások [Modifications]. JAK füzetek 4 [JAK booklets 4]. Budapest: Magvető Könyvkiadó, 1983.
[9] The Fiatal Művészek Klubja Fotószekciója [Photosection of the Young Artists’ Club] was established in 1974, and in 1977 the Studio of Young Photographers was formed within (and under the organizational control of) the Association of Hungarian Photo Artists. Until the end of 1990, the Studio supported 183 photographic projects through its so-called synopsis system.
[10] Gábor Kerekes’s website: http://w3.enternet.hu/kgj/
[11] See Szerencsés 13 év [13 years of Szerencsés]. Az Esztergomi Galéria katalógusa [The Catalogue of the Esztergom Galéria], 1984. In this we can find twenty-three pictures – the complete oeuvre is not much more than that. The Hungarian photography community still owes the people a more serious study on the career of Szerencsés.
[12] Jokesz, Antal. A preparált idő nyomában. [In Search of Prepared Time.] Veszprém: Művészetek Háza [House of Arts], 1999.
[13] The Hungarian history of photography and fine arts still owes a debt in covering the career of János Vető. Only one small book has been published by and about him: László Beke and Gabriella Csizek, editors. NahTe. Budapest: Magyar Fotográfusok Háza Könyvei 1. [Hungarian House of Photography Books I], 2003.
[14] From this on it does not make much sense to keep track of the generations, partly because they started to overlap and also because they alternated so fast.
[15] For Moholy’s ‘theory of errors’ see: Szilágyi, Sándor. Anti-fotográfia. A fotográfia mint a művészi kommunikáció médiuma Moholy-Nagy László optico-pedagógiai rendszerében. [Anti-Photography: Photography as the Medium of Art in the Optico-pedagogical system of László Moholy-Nagy]. PhD dissertation, 2013.
[16] For a study of Hungarian body art see: Sturcz, János. A heroikus ego lebontása [The Dismantling of the Heroic Ego]. Budapest: Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem [Hungarian University of Fine Arts], 2006. Further reading: Oltai, Kata (editor and study). Ujj Zsuzsi: Fotós munkák Photoworks 1985–1991. Budapest: MissionArt Galéria, 2013.
[17] Tóth György’s portfolio: http://www.fotografus.hu/hu/fotografusok/toth-gyorgy
[18] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yANkMPwC46g
[19] Bálint Flesch’s website: http://balint-flesch.hol.es/
[20] Ágnes Eperjesi’s website: http://www.eperjesi.hu/
[21] Aliona Frankl’s portfolio: http://www.fotografus.hu/hu/fotografusok/frankl-aliona
[22] Balázs Telek’s portfolio: http://www.fotografus.hu/hu/fotografusok/telek-balazs
[23] András Bozsó’s portfolio: http://www.fotografus.hu/hu/fotografusok/bozso-andras
[24] Enikő Gábor’s website: http://www.gaboreniko.hu/fooldal
[25] The photographic website of Károly Minyó Szert: http://minyo.hu/index.php?item=4&kepek=65
[26] He worked as a photojournalist, for example for Képes 7.
[27] Drégely Imre’s portfolio: http://www.fotografus.hu/hu/fotografusok/dregely-imre. See also Szilágyi, Sándor. Take this Photoshop! VASA Journal on Images and Culture, http://vjic.org/vjic2/?page_id=4703
[28] With regards to this, it was Zsolt Péter Barta who brought Calum Colvin’s pictures to my attention, but as much as I could tell based on the pictures found on the Internet, the visual world of the two artists are very different.
[29] Antal Jama Farkas’s portfolio: http://www.fotografus.hu/hu/fotografusok/farkas-antal-jama