Mihály Gera

Budapest Books for the Coffee Table

Budapest anno… (also in English, French and German). Corvina, 1979, 1984, 188 pp.; New, abbreviated edition, 1996. * Zsolt Szabóky-György Száraz: Budapest (also in English, French and German). Corvina, 1982, 1989, 122 pp. * György Lõrinczy: A budai vár (English edition: The Castle Hill in Buda, also in French and German). Corvina, 1967, 107 pp. • Károly Hemzõ: Budapest (In English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian). Corvina, 1993, 107 pp. * Tamás Révész: Budapest: Egy város az

ezredfordulón - Budapest: A City before the Millennium. Herald, 1996, 108 pp.

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In the photographs of György Klösz (1844-1910), the real turn-of-the-century city is seen in the way it revealed itself and its ordinary life to the curious eyes and the camera of Klösz. The album takes its readers on a tour of a city still retaining some of its former small-town atmosphere, as it developed with dazzling speed and energy; the tour guide is an exceptionally gifted craftsman with a fine sense of composition and an all-encompassing attention. First we look over at Buda from the Danube bank of the Pest side, then we make a short tour of the Buda side. We look down on the tiny old houses of the old Tabán district, peer into a couple of aristocratic townhouses, then wander along the streets and squares of Castle Hill, noting with some surprise how barren Dísz Square, a splendid place today, still looked in the 1860s. The next stop is the Royal Palace, followed by a visit to the cog-wheel railway on Svábhegy, after which we descend a bit to take in a few street scenes followed by public baths (Budapest was, and still is, famous for its medicinal springs). We continue our way over Margaret Bridge, pausing for a glimpse of Margaret Island and then come headlong into the bustle of Pest. There are pictures of a bakery, an engineering works, a crowded marketplace, snapshots of coffee-house life, a market hall and warehouse, with the denizens of Pest watching the photographer at work with curiosity in their eyes.

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In Tamás Révész's multilingual Budapest. A City before the Millennium the well-known sights are hardly present. There is often sadness, sometimes irony. The people in the pictures are far from happy (most have been caught partly or fully with their backs to the camera); they appear to be rather apathetic, with plenty to worry about. "In my pictures," the author writes, "I would like to reproduce the airy grandeur of Canaletto's paintings through photography, while also attempting to give a kind of documentary insight into the workaday world of its inhabitants." This is the first album of Budapest to record not only what is beautiful but also what we have thus far kept bashfully silent about: houses with peeling walls,a gutted entry phone, a homeless man sleeping on a bench (in front of a 17th-century Turkish baths) or a beggar on Szabadság híd (Liberty Bridge). One of the album's especially interesting features is the eight shots taken from the same places from where György Klösz tookphotographs at the end of the last century. Klösz's original photographs are printed side by side with Révész's pictures taken with a special camera (Noblex Pro Panorama).

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Mihály Gera

is a journalist and a writer on photography. He is President of the Union of Hungarian Photographic Artists and chief editor at the Intera publishing company.