The 3rd National Salon of Photography at the Kunsthalle Budapest marks an exceptional meeting of two long-standing photographic “institutions”, namely the salon exhibitions surveying a given period and anthologies presenting numerous photographers in a single volume to present a panorama of the genre.
In the early fine art salons, canonised art was presented to the interested, culture-seeking members of the middle class at various “ritualised” events (jurying, opening ceremonies, guided tours, critical reviews, etc.). Over time, when a particular salon was announced, current artistic ideas or group interests were occasionally expressed besides listing and canonising works. One such idea urged the acceptance of a new type of visual medium, photography, as an autonomous form of art. After heated debates, the Paris Salon opened its doors to photographs in 1862, although admission was through a separate entrance. Prior to that, the first independent photographic exhibition had been held at the House of the Society of Arts in London in 1856. From then on, photographic exhibitions, club salons and the showing of artistic photography either nationally or internationally proved highly popular with the general public from Argentina to India. In the meantime, photographers ever more passionately submitted their works by post and collected prizes internationally. As a result, the fine art salons eventually became purely commercial enterprises, with the exception of their versions renamed “national exhibitions”, which rose to prominence in countries grappling with their ideology, identity or their peripheral position. In Hungary, such nationwide exhibitions lost their original function after the political transition, yet continued in various forms. Although received with some caution by the art professions, they nonetheless attracted broad participation and the same keen interest from the public.
One of the key questions facing today’s “national exhibitions” concerns the list of participants. Can anyone apply or only invited artists? Should there be a jury or not? Should there be a curatorial concept? Given contemporary audiences, a large survey exhibition is unmanageably heterogeneous without one, while curators inevitably narrow down the scope and select subjectively. The list of invitees to the 3rd National Salon of Photography was not drawn up during ad hoc brainstorming or a casual compilation of names but emerged from thorough preparation, especially the work that went into the substantial volume 300 Masters of Hungarian Photography.
The initiative behind this book was inspired partly by a significant global cultural shift and partly by a unique local artistic situation. It seemed to be a moment both timely and meaningful to survey Hungarian photography since, in the digital age, our concept of photographic art is bound to change. It also seemed to be the moment to stand up for the unity of the profession. Financial support for the project was secured by the Hungarian Academy of Arts, through the intercession of László Haris, Sándor Buglya and László Koppány Csáji. My partners in the creative team were Károly Kincses and Gábor Fejér. Extensive preparatory work was carried out by the editorial board led by László Haris: Zsolt Péter Barta, Ábel Szalontai, Klára Szarka and Tamás Szigeti. Approaching the material from the perspective of artistic practice, studying the images and reflecting on individual careers, we gradually arrived at a shared, harmonised concept regarding which works and which artistic paths can best guide viewers amidst the continually shifting interpretations of photographic art. But why three hundred? Our original list was considerably longer. Instead of producing a mere “stamp collection”, we wanted to allocate a double-page spread to each participant. Six hundred was the maximum number of pages that can be contained between two hard covers. What unites these three hundred names? Not simply technique— the fact that each of these artists records (or recorded) light directly onto a sensitised surface—but rather a shared, if not precisely definable, understanding of photography. This hefty tome could have been divided into slimmer volumes but that would have led to multiple organising principles: photographic arts, in the plural. Yet, here and now, it seemed more important to identify what is common in the diverse approaches, technical procedures, aesthetic principles and social applications. It is our hope that the book will be available at the opening of the Salon.
The list of invitees to the Salon followed naturally: those three hundred contemporary artists who are still active today. The majority accepted our invitation, and a few who had set aside their cameras some time ago asked to be represented by their earlier works, which we were happy to allow.
My co-editor, Károly Kincses, discusses the role of salons and the present exhibition in this catalogue, while I myself will share some thoughts about the professional and historical contexts of the volume 300 Masters of Hungarian Photography.
The history of albums can be traced back to the earliest photographic processes. From the very beginning, photographers sought to present their technical experiments, image-making intentions, visions, experiences and impressions in some coherent and marketable form. Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (published in instalments between 1844 and 1846), celebrating representation by means of sunlight, was mainly followed by unique and reproduced albums presenting distant landscapes (such as that by a Hungarian, Pál Rosti, documenting his travels in Latin America). Exhibition and later collection catalogues, which often included brief descriptions of the photographs beyond their reproductions and occasionally indicated prices, became important publication types. Publishers of books on photography wrestled with printing techniques and image quality; poorly printed editions concealed many photographic shortcomings. From time to time, photographers, like Fox Talbot himself, tried to publish portfolio-grade photographs. In Hungary, perhaps the first publication of this high quality appeared in 1967: Károly Gink’s large-format Lighea album, for which they ultimately used hand-enlarged prints rather than commercially printed reproductions.
During the 20th century, new categories of photographic books entered the market: critically conceived editorial publications (notably those promoting the “New Vision” in Europe around the early 1930s), illustrated volumes, and photo-novels (often fostering genuine dialogue between text and image), albums on individual photographers (usually accompanied by a preface of literary quality), and, eventually, monographs on photographers with evaluating- contextualising studies. Robert Frank’s groundbreaking photographic album Les Américains (1958) ventured beyond autonomous visual language to analyse social experience in visual terms. This, of course, had its antecedents in American photographic culture, such as the books by Bill Brandt or Walker Evans. However, peculiarly enough, works of comparable ambition and impact were also published in Hungary, such as Tiborc (1937) by Kata Kálmán, and later, although not belatedly, New York, New York (1972) by György Lőrinczy, which achieved notable international acclaim among collectors. Another favoured medium of communication among younger photographers today is the photobook.
Volumes presenting a broad range of photographers (not linked to specific exhibitions) constituted a separate category. The first such publications in Hungary were the series starting from 1906, titled A művészi fényképezés évkönyve [The Yearbook of Art Photography], which affirmed pictorialism, followed by Magyar fényképezés 1939 [Hungarian Photography 1939], edited by Károly Rosner, which, albeit gently, opened the way for new concepts of the medium. After the war, standing out among propaganda publications was the Budapest album (1956), edited by János Reismann (numerous multi-author tourist volumes appeared later, which are deserving of recognition for their significance in the art of photography).
A new type of survey volume emerged in 1958 and lasted for a few years. The Kádár era sought to impose a unified order upon the art world from the outset, and it encouraged the publication of photographic yearbooks despite the heavy financial losses they made. (Like in higher- quality amateur catalogues and journals, the early yearbooks listed the camera, lens, aperture, shutter speed, time of day and film used for each photograph.) “It is an interesting mosaic with opposing approaches alternating in it,” wrote the editors in the introduction to the first volume of Magyar fotóművészet [Hungarian Photography] (1958). Four such albums were published, followed by one more in 1971, which ended the publication of volumes aiming to provide a full overview, although catalogues with a more limited photographic material were occasionally produced. In certain specialist areas, such as photojournalism or nature photography, professional solidarity has remained active, with yearbooks issued more or less regularly. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Association of Hungarian Photographers, significant reference-style surveys were published. These volumes fostered professional communication; however, the portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, genre scenes, lilies, elephants and dawn fishing expeditions arranged without a strong visual logic held limited appeal for the lay public.
While 300 Masters of Hungarian Photography is heir to a distinguished tradition, it also required courage at the same time: although we were able to draw on photographic- historical research to some extent (although not on previous survey volumes), we could not lull ourselves into the illusion that a broad professional consensus exists in the field of photography. Thus, we focused attention not only on selecting the exhibited material but also on ensuring that the six hundred photographs (two per artist) and the three hundred essays introducing the photographers (written by more than a hundred authors) would amount to more than mere enumeration and come together as a meaningful whole providing a coherent interpretation. We also had to take care that the texts accompanying the photographs would not lapse into the listing of data (reference works such as Ferenc Markovics’s Fények és tények [Light and Fact], Péter Fitz’s three-volume Kortárs magyar művészeti lexikon [Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Hungarian Art], and above all, the internet are readily available) but instead successfully contextualise and provide interpretation of the artistic oeuvres; in other words, when “read together”, they would illuminate the changing ambitions and highlights of Hungarian photographic art over the past one and a half centuries.
We trust that whenever photographic art is discussed, our book, like this catalogue, will serve as a fundamental point of reference for a long time to come, until the next major enterprise reassesses the story we have told.