Péter Baki

On Home Ground

Károly Kincses & Magdolna Kolta: Hazai anyag. Fotónapló. André Kertész és a magyarok- Taken at Home. Photo Diary. André Kertész and the Hungarians. Hungarian House of Photography- Mai Manó House, Budapest, 2005. 271 pp.

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André Kertész left Hungary, and was probably right to do so: he became world-famous. A fair few of the photogra- phers who chose to stay at home were noteworthy too- to mention only József Pécsi, Károly Escher, Olga Máté, Dénes Rónai, Rudolf Balogh... But need I say more? Not one of them is known abroad outside very specialist circles, yet if they had left, they too, like Kertész, might fea- ture in albums devoted to photography's greats. Those who went abroad tend to be known even to foreigners with only a mod- erate interest in the subject. The likes of Robert Capa, Brassai, László Moholy-Nagy, Martin Munkácsi, György Kepes... Need I add others?
It is hard to write anything new about André Kertész. Many publishers around the world have already put out albums of his work; every phase of his life has been combed over; and Kertész has said all there is to say about himself in numerous inter- views. Yet, if Hungarians really wanted to know Kertész and his work before this book came along, one thing was conspicu- ously difficult to gain access to- the mate- rial shot in his homeland, the taste of home that Kertész very much carried with him throughout his life. It is not just a matter of the Kertész archives outside Hungary being unable to respond if someone asks them for the "Teleki Square" or "Kálvin Square" pictures (the latter is entitled Budapest, Spring, 1921 and features in the supplement of this issue); the photos themselves mean nothing to them either, because they are not in a position to locate the view within a Hungarian reality. Many of the photographs that Kertész took in the early stages of his career can truly only be appre- ciated through the eyes of a Hungarian. In most of his public statements, Kertész commented that he was using his photographs as a means of keeping a diary. That is the starting-point for this book, as the authors have processed all of Kertész's Hungarian "memories" in order to locate all of the shots he made in Hungary or which relate to Hungary. They carried out some ingenious detective work to show us the spots that Kertész visited and the sub- jects that he photographed during his years in Hungary. And not just those pictures that were taken within the present territory of the country, for quite a number were shot within the wider bounds of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, indeed, even further afield during Kertész's First World War military service.

Kertész used to declare that it was not a matter of photography altering his life but of his life influencing his photography. The book makes it clear that he was not exaggerating: it really was like that. A shortcoming is that it does not supply (because no-one can yet supply) even an approximately complete index of the pho- tographs that he produced in Hungary. Kertész' estate survives scattered in various packages across the world. The biggest col- lections are those in the keeping of the Estate of André Kertész in New York and the Mission Patrimoine Photographique in Paris, but originals are also to be found in the André Kertész Memorial Museum in his native village of Szigetbecse and the Museum of Photography in Kecskemét. Now that this book has been completed, we are in a position to appreciate that a mere fraction of all the pictures taken in Hungary are in our own field of vision. Under Kertész's will, his negatives, slides and documents were bequeathed to the French state. With close to one hundred thousand negatives alone, the pictures that feature in the book represent only a small part of this section of the oeuvre. The story is a typically Hungarian one, a home truth. Towards the end of his life, André Kertész asked the Budapest city authorities to provide a pied-a-terre for him to stay in whenever he came on a visit. He did not have anything particularly grand in mind: just an ordinary apartment that would revert to the city after his death. In return, he offered the Hungarian state a substantial proportion of his life-work.
Seeing the hesitation on the part of the city authorities, Kertész dropped his request, and in the end no apartment was provided. The country thereby managed to spurn him a second time by failing to hold him for what he could offer. While that was going on, Paris placed at his disposal a small apartment that he was at liberty to use whenever his travels took him there. To the best of my knowledge, he never stayed there for any great length of time. The upshot, however, was that the Mission Patrimoine Photographique now holds 98,000 negatives, positives and other items, including his personal notes, in a place where the staff cannot speak Hungarian and where translation is a painfully slow business, undertaken by people who are not experts.

 

Péter Baki
is Director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography.