SUMMARY– 2018/3

Béla Albertini: The History of Hungarian Photography: August 1919 – June 1941
This is the first piece of a longer series of articles by Béla Albertini. The series focuses on the history of Hungarian photography between the two World Wars. The first part of the article published in this issue describes the antecedents and background of the historical period starting in 1919, and outlines the international context. In the second part, the author offers a meticulous analysis of the photos, books and other publications that appeared in contemporary press, and presents the most important personalities related to them. The article covers the period lasting from August 1919 to the summer of 1920.

Andrea Bordács: Slow Life – Csilla Szabó’s Photographs
Csilla Szabó is a photographer of Hungarian descent who now lives in Berlin. In this article, Andrea Bordács introduces the readers to the background of Csilla Szabó’s works. Csilla Szabó’s works typically process the elementary components of the objective world, and wonder at the whole from their perspective; they stop the moment, focus on details, and proceed from the detail to the whole picture. Her pictures compel recipients to slow down.

György Cséka: The Order of Illusion – On the Art of Gábor Ősz
Part 1
Gábor Ősz is an outstanding figure of both Hungarian and international photography. Part 1 of György Cséka’s article published in this number analyses some of Gábor Ősz’s series with passion and expertise. Cséka is not interested in chronology; what he wishes to point out is connections between the individual series, their different perspectives and the consequent shifts in the photographer’s attitude. The article clearly and vividly introduces the reader to Gábor Ősz’s relation to picture and photography as well as to the questions the artist seeks to explore.

Dejan Sluga: Stane Jagodič – The Worshipper of Light
Stane Jagodič (1943) is a unique figure of Slovene photography and fine arts. Jagodič’s career began in the 1970s, and taking advantage of the relative freedom in the former Yugoslavia, he started working together with such artists as Christo and Fontcuberta. In his abstract and satirical world, photos, caricatures, assemblages went hand in hand with the use of X-ray films. In the 1980s, he was awarded the special prize of Paris Photo. A highly engaged author, his statements have signposted all his career, while his works testify of his profound character judgement, free thinking sense of humour.

Gábor Ébli: Painting, photo, film – conversation with Laszló Gerő about the collection of photography
On the occasion of a large-scale exhibition of his collection in the Art Mill in Szentendre, businessman László Gerő explains in this interview how he has integrated over the past ten years photography into his extensive art collection dominated by international and Hungarian painterly and conceptual positions. By comprising film-stills, too, this collection stands for a holistic view of contemporary painting, photography and moving (often digital) pictures under the common umbrella of artistic image-making.

Zsuzsa Farkas: József Rippl-Rónai in Fény
Photographs made of artists have always attracted wide interest, and Hungary had very talented portrait photographers at the beginning of the 20th century. József Rippl-Rónai was also photographed by many different photographers. Zsuzsa Farkas’s article discusses the story of the photographs made of Rippl-Rónai and his close circles, which came out in a contemporary paper, Fény, and she also examines how these affected the painter’s art. Thanks to her extensive research, the article exposes some works that have never been published in Hungary before.

Márton Jankovics: Childhoods – Interview with Carla Kogelman, World Press Photo Prize Winner
Carla Kogelman received first prize for her Waldviertel project in the Long-Term Project category of World Press Photo 2018. Márton Jankovics interviewed Kogelman to get an insight into the secrets of this project.

Zsuzsanna Komjáthy: Eleven Walks in Space Suit – The Diploma Works of the Graduates of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MA in Photography)
This year 11 photographers obtained a degree in the master’s programme of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME). Zsuzsanna Komjáthy examines their diploma works one by one and shares her impressions about them.

Emese Miskolczi: The Visual Harmonics of Batia Suter
In connection with an exhibition in Le Bal Gallery, Paris, Emese Miskolczi reports about the works of Batia Suter, a photographer of Swiss descent who now works in Amsterdam. Batia Suter’s experiments and studies about the meaning of images and the changes in their meaning depending on their environment testify of her thorough and analytical way of thinking. Works so far created by Suter open up a new, radical approach to photographical images. A sensitive observer, Emese Miskolczi analyses the ways in which Suter experiments with the characteristics of perception.

Gábor Pfisztner: The Reality of the Phenomenon – Péter Türk and Photography
Péter Türk’s oeuvre is extremely diverse – as demonstrated by his exhibition in Ludwig Museum. For Péter Türk, the world and nature manifest themselves as images, and his pictures are instruments in his hands to make the invisible visible and guide recipients towards a deeper meaning. Consequently, Gábor Pfisztner’s article also goes beyond a simple discussion of the photography-based works of Türk: rather, he offers a complex analysis of Péter Türk’s creative attitude, and his formulations and goals manifested in his pictures.

Réka Szentirmay: Colourful Reminiscence
Alphons Luis Marie Antoine Hubert Hustinx saw the light of day in 1900 in the Netherlands as the eldest child of affluent parents. Hustinx was ambitious, curious and well-off, so nothing stopped him from travelling the world with his Leica from Afghanistan to Africa. What makes his oeuvre unique is that from the late 1930s, he already worked with Agfa colour film, and he captured the everyday life of the Netherlands during and after the Second World War. On the occasion of his exhibition displayed in the Hague Museum of Photography (Fotomuseum Den Haag), Réka Szentirmay introduces the readers to Houstinx’s world.