Károly Kincses
Remembrance
of Things Past
Two Hungarian Photographers in Britain
Iván Szabó produced some unique achievements in a working life
that lasted only six or seven years making a living out of photography in
a city where the world's best photographers lived. He (rather than they) would
sometimes be singled out in accounts of exhibitions. He exhibited with Talbot
and John and Robert Adamson, and he was asked to take a photograph by David
Octavius Hill, to whom he wrote letters on 20 and 26 June 1857. Hill asked
Szabó to photograph The Pursuit of Pleasure, a painting by Noël Paton. Szabó
replied that it would take time, for it was indeed a complicated task at that
early stage in the development of photography. One problem was the size of
the painting and the possibility that it would move during the long exposure,
for the shot was to be taken outdoors. "The wind...puts me to great uneasiness,"
he wrote, for negatives of that period were less sensitive and lenses smaller,
so that an exposure could take long minutes, in which time the canvas might
flap in the breeze. Unfortunately, it is not known whether the photograph
was ever taken, or, if so, whether it pleased Hill.
Others, meanwhile, including the Edinburgh Evening Courant, were praising
Szabó for several portraits he showed at the Photographic Society of Scotland
exhibition in 1856 - 7:
The gain is ours, that he has exchanged arms for art, the
sword for the camera. Considering the limited time which Mr Szabo has as yet
devoted to the cultivation of photography, his success is not only remarkable
in itself, but holds out the promise that he will ere long attain the very
highest position among photographers. Mr Szabo is particularly happy in the
natural and pleasing pose of his figures, his works being worthy of admiration
equally as pictures and as likenesses.
The same exhibition included a portrait of Szabó by Thomas Rodger. The Caledonian
Mercury of 29 December 1856 had also been taken with him:
Some portraits by Ivan Szabo, of Salisbury Place, Newington,
a pupil, if we remember rightly, of Mr Rodger's, are in many respects equal
to those exhibited by his instructor, and are decidedly superior to any others
in the exhibition.
In the following year it was reported that Szabó had won a prize at the World
Exposition in Brussels. At the Edinburgh exhibition of the Photographic Society
of Scotland he showed, among other pictures, a portrait of Sir George Harvey,
president of the Royal Scottish Academy at the time, and won praise again
from the Edinburgh Evening Courant on 12 January 1858:
Among our own portrait artists, we give the first place to
Mr Szabo. We have already mentioned his picture of Mrs Findlay, so much admired
at Brussels. The portraits of Rev. Dr. Keith (367), Mr G. Patton (339), and
several pictures of children (382 etc.) are as successful as the art seems
capable of, and quite equal to some of Mr Rodger of St. Andrews, whose style
Mr Szabo adopts, we will not say imitates.
The following April, during the last spring of Szabó's short life, he took
a photograph of William Henry Fox Talbot, his wife and children at their home,
Lacock Abbey, which has become a splendid museum. In the archives there, this
note was found:
From I. Szabo, 4, Salisbury Place, Newington,
Edinburgh, June 1858.
1 Calotype Portrait of Miss Talbot, first impr. £1. 3. ..
1 " " Miss A. Talbot " 1. 3. ..
1 " " Miss B. Talbot " 1. 3. ..
1 Copy of Miss B. Talbot - 7. ..
*
Writing of herself, Mari
Mahr said, "I live between two countries and have four nationalities,
but as my parents were Hungarians and I myself lived the most important period
of my life there, from the age of 8 to 32, I count myself one as well."
Her photos are accordingly imbued with remembrances of things past. They document
a private, esoteric world, like drawers in a private chest, each containing
a memento of her mother or a fragment of her grandmother's life: an elegant
little turn-of-the-century shoe, a charming parasol, or a glacé glove buttoning
up to the elbow. Allusions, full of signs and undiscovered secrets. Excuses
to pull open a drawer. Mari Mahr's photographs look into the questions of
our time: the question of affiliation, of being neither of one place nor another,
of partly losing a culture and obtaining another.
If anyone was in a position to do that, she was. She was born in Santiago
de Chile, where her Hungarian parents had fled the anti-Jewish persecutions
of the Second World War. The family returned to Hungary in 1948, when Mari
was still a little girl. She completed school in Budapest, attended the Journalists'
School, and then started working as a photo reporter. She was 22 years old
when she was employed by the cultural department of the Hungarian News Agency,
MTI. Among her colleagues and mentors were such outstanding photographers
as Endre Friedmann, Edit Molnár, Jenő Pap and Gábor Pálfai. She was also
helped by Péter Korniss. She worked extremely hard, but nonetheless she was
dismissed four years later. Why she lost her job (or what was the reason)
is difficult to establish after so many years. Things like that could easily
happen at the time. She recalled later,
I loved my job and I liked my colleagues, but after a time
there was a disciplinary action and I was dismissed. I then laid down my camera
and I didn't start taking pictures again until much later, in England. Meanwhile,
I went to work for Pannónia Film Studios.
There she met her second husband, who was busy in Budapest directing a feature-length
cartoon film called Hugo the Hippo. She moved to London in 1972 and studied
at the Polytechnic of Central London for three years, where she obtained a
diploma in photography.
In Budapest, at the Journalists' School and at MTI, I'd simply
learnt the craft of a photo reporter (which has been very useful to me, of
course), whereas here it was left entirely up to me to choose what branch
of photography I was going to work in... I sought a new formal idiom and tried
out various techniques.
It is interesting to follow the process. Marianna Maár, the photo reporter
in Hungary, would set out from the news agency every morning with precise
ideological and aesthetic instructions, to capture a particular event. Now,
in her new environment, she became a photographer interested in the affairs
of the world exclusively in their own context, subordinated to the mood, feelings
and ideas of reality. These are not pictures of Reality, but Ideas, Feelings
and Dreams that have come to life and taken shape, as if time had stood still
and a piece of it had been extracted and preserved for ever. No, unfortunately
not. Although I agree with that important doctrine of photography, Mari Mahr's
pictures do not make time stand still. Indeed they reconstruct it, creating
continuity and a transition between yesterday and today, with allusions and
coded messages valid, of course, for tomorrow as well.
Here in Hungary I worked as a photo reporter and believed
that photos were meant to uncover reality and thereby serve as an accurate
document for the future. Once I was in England, I found myself in a world
where I couldn't really find my way. I didn't understand the country, I didn't
understand the language, and I lost my self-confidence. I wasn't sure any
more what reality was. I felt I had to seek a new idiom for my photography,
technically and thematically as well.
When she had completed college, she took her portfolio of photographs to
the Photographers' Gallery, which each year gives twelve young photographers
an opportunity to exhibit their work. She was fortunate enough to be chosen,
and it was no hasty decision, as is clear from the fact that she has regularly
exhibited new work there since. Slowly people learnt her strange-sounding
name. In the mid-1980s, she began to be better known. Lengthy, consistent
efforts have brought her to the point where she has created an emphatically
and expressly subjective photographic style, giving a prominent role to memories,
which can be easily recognised even if there is no signature at the bottom
of the picture. She often enlarges scenes into series, sequences and pairs
of pictures, which extend the moment and bounds of the picture in time and
space. When she composes her pictures, she gives a new context to pages of
books, stills from films, and objects that are familiar but that nonetheless
bear special significance. These she uses to build up her installations, which
are mystical in their effect. Through her pictures, her real, dreamt or invented
occurrences are experienced again by those who view them, as freely reinterpreted
experiences of their own. Each picture is latently about affiliation. They
are attempts to clarify her relationship to three main areas: the family,
the world and photography. Are there any further important things apart from
these, I wonder. Mari Mahr first did a long series each for her mother and
her grandmother, and then it was the turn of a third woman, her daughter.
But the series devoted to the three female family members all, from start
to finish, concern a fourth female member of that family, Mari Mahr. There
was no real need to say who they were about. The three series were shown in
1994 at the first Hungarian exhibition by that fourth member, held at the
Museum of Hungarian Photography.
Károly Kincses
is Director of the Museum of Hungarian Photography in Kecskemét and its sister
organisation, the Hungarian House of Photography in Mai Manó House in Budapest.
He is the author of several books on photography and photographers.
