“Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika” by Martin Munkácsi (circa 1930)
Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th CenturyRoyal Academy, 30th June to 2nd October, Tel: 020 7300 8000 When it comes to photography in the 20th century, the Hungarians had it sewn up. Robert Capa, the ultimate action man photojournalist, was killed in the line of work. László Moholy-Nagy was probably the best of the modernist abstract image-makers. Brassaï’s poetic lens still defines our sense of interwar Paris. Martin Munkácsi invented fashion photography as we know it, while André Kertész probably had the edge on Henri Cartier-Bresson as the master of quirky observation. That five of the greatest, most influential photographers should have been Hungarian feels extraordinary. The sheer number of iconic images in the Royal Academy’s show will stop you in your tracks. It is also somehow just what you’d expect. Many of us were probably unaware that these men were Hungarian. Capa sounds like he might be Italian-American—which is what he (real name Endre Friedmann) intended. The names adopted by Brassaï (real name Gyula Halász), Kertész (Andor Kohn) and Munkácsi (Marton Mermelstein) also serve to conceal their origins. The ostentatiously Magyar-sounding Moholy-Nagy (real name László Weisz) is so closely identified with the Bauhaus that he feels like an honorary German. All of Hungary’s big five were Jewish. They made their names not in Budapest, but in Berlin, Paris and New York. There was a more than creditable second division, many of whom were also Jewish and also left the country. The interwar art and media worlds of western Europe and America were awash with political exiles. Behind every exciting development in architecture, film and just about everything else was a central European on the run from Hitler. That some of the best photographers should have been Hungarian Jews doesn’t seem the least bit surprising. Yet the great tradition of photojournalism exemplified by Capa, in which images are as important as text, began in Hungary. Publications such as the quaintly named Interesting Newspaper began telling stories in sequences of images linked over several pages by long headlines as early as 1916. The phenomenon spread west with the flight of photographers and editors; that great British institution Picture Post was co-founded by a Hungarian, Stefan Lorant. In Berlin, London and New York, Hungarian photographers worked for Hungarian editors and picture agencies, such as Keystone, Focal and Depho, run by Hungarians who were, in almost all cases, Jewish.
Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th CenturyRoyal Academy, 30th June to 2nd October, Tel: 020 7300 8000 When it comes to photography in the 20th century, the Hungarians had it sewn up. Robert Capa, the ultimate action man photojournalist, was killed in the line of work. László Moholy-Nagy was probably the best of the modernist abstract image-makers. Brassaï’s poetic lens still defines our sense of interwar Paris. Martin Munkácsi invented fashion photography as we know it, while André Kertész probably had the edge on Henri Cartier-Bresson as the master of quirky observation. That five of the greatest, most influential photographers should have been Hungarian feels extraordinary. The sheer number of iconic images in the Royal Academy’s show will stop you in your tracks. It is also somehow just what you’d expect. Many of us were probably unaware that these men were Hungarian. Capa sounds like he might be Italian-American—which is what he (real name Endre Friedmann) intended. The names adopted by Brassaï (real name Gyula Halász), Kertész (Andor Kohn) and Munkácsi (Marton Mermelstein) also serve to conceal their origins. The ostentatiously Magyar-sounding Moholy-Nagy (real name László Weisz) is so closely identified with the Bauhaus that he feels like an honorary German. All of Hungary’s big five were Jewish. They made their names not in Budapest, but in Berlin, Paris and New York. There was a more than creditable second division, many of whom were also Jewish and also left the country. The interwar art and media worlds of western Europe and America were awash with political exiles. Behind every exciting development in architecture, film and just about everything else was a central European on the run from Hitler. That some of the best photographers should have been Hungarian Jews doesn’t seem the least bit surprising. Yet the great tradition of photojournalism exemplified by Capa, in which images are as important as text, began in Hungary. Publications such as the quaintly named Interesting Newspaper began telling stories in sequences of images linked over several pages by long headlines as early as 1916. The phenomenon spread west with the flight of photographers and editors; that great British institution Picture Post was co-founded by a Hungarian, Stefan Lorant. In Berlin, London and New York, Hungarian photographers worked for Hungarian editors and picture agencies, such as Keystone, Focal and Depho, run by Hungarians who were, in almost all cases, Jewish.
“Wedding” by László Fejes (1965)
So does the triumph of Hungarian photography correspond with something in the nation’s culture? Was a Hungarian tendency towards visual storytelling exported without the rest of the world noticing? Or did the upheavals of war lead to a creative surge in central European culture, a process in which Hungarianness is incidental? The Royal Academy exhibition tells two parallel stories, each heroic and anti-heroic in equal measure. The show’s curator Colin Ford relates the story, told to him by the Hungarian Andor Kraszna-Krausz, owner of the agency Focal, that in pre-war Hungary every boy was given a camera for his eleventh or twelfth birthday—or in the case of Jewish boys, at their bar mitzvah. The image of the boy in his best suit clutching his initiatory gift creates the romantic sense of a country where photography is of immense importance, its techniques and ethos absorbed into the blood on a kind of folk-cultural level. Yet most of the big five didn’t turn to the medium automatically. Brassaï started out as a painter, Capa and Munkácsi as journalists, while Moholy-Nagy explored many disciplines. If none came from strongly religious backgrounds, equally none were from the kind of multilingual, cosmopolitan Jewish background described in the book of the moment, The Hare with Amber Eyes. They were all thoroughly Hungarianised, and in the case of Capa and Kertész failed ever to learn another language. Arriving in Berlin in flight from the repressive Horthy regime, Capa abandoned journalism in favour of the lens, and achieved spectacular results with the new lightweight 35mm cameras, creating images that put the viewer right into the action: under fire in freezing water in his juddering D-Day photographs; carried on the jeering crowd in “Two women collaborators being marched home,” the queasy hypocrisy of collaborationist France captured in one unforgettable frame. If the iconic image “The Falling Soldier”—a Republican fighter thrown back, arm outstretched, as he takes a bullet in the Spanish Civil War—was recently discovered to have been faked, that does nothing to diminish its impact. People die in war, as Capa did himself, stepping on a landmine in French Indochina in 1954. Martin Munkácsi turned dull, static, studio-bound fashion photography into the outdoor, story-driven medium we know today, bringing his photojournalistic skills to Harper’s Bazaar in 1933. There’s a powerfully abstract feel to Munkácsi’s images, typified by the stark diagonal of his female “Nude,” and by the pattern of exuberant silhouettes in “Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika” (above). Akin to the formalist pattern-making of Moholy-Nagy’s experimental Bauhaus images—his “Radio Tower Berlin” turns tracks in the snow into severe geometry—it collapses the boundaries between commercial and art photography. Whether we’re looking at “Isère Valley” by Brassaï, which reduces an aerial view of alpine fields into a single spectacular, sculptural mass, or “Martinique” by Kertész, a fugitive silhouette behind frosted glass seen against a dead flat sea, there’s an intuitive veering in these artists towards exploring the formal essentials of the medium: luminosity, pattern, textural juxtaposition. Even a news photograph like Capa’s “Last Casualty of the War” is highly painterly in its composition. While these artists were defining the terms of the modernist photograph out of sight of the Hungarian public, photography back in their homeland took a very different course, as practitioners of the so-called “Hungarian style” used the medium to promote a sense of national identity. Its founder Rudolf Balogh created epic and idealised views of life on the Great Hungarian Plain: shepherds and horse round-ups seen beneath vast, cloud-laden skies. The social realism of the “new vision” photographers provided the main counter-strain, and became the official style of post-war Hungary. Kata Kalman’s portraits of factory workers, though powerful, project just a little too much radiant intensity. Yet there was still space for the non-aligned image. László Fejes’s “Wedding” (above) presents a hilariously deadpan picture of Soviet bloc ritual in the 1970s. At the other end of the scale, Eva Besnyö’s image of a small boy walking away along a tree-lined avenue, a huge cello strapped on his back, represents another typically Hungarian predilection: for the fleeting, whimsical human moment—what Kertész called “little happenings.” Around this image, taken in 1931, you can sense the arid, rolling distances of central Europe in summer. Perhaps the desire to seize on this kind of touching micro-incident is a reaction to living in an immense, largely featureless landmass where boundaries have never been absolute. While the picture’s title, “Hungary,” refers simply to where it was taken, it’s difficult not to feel some larger message brooding behind it. Mark Hudson is the award-winning author of “Titian, the Last Days,” and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph
