Júlia Papp
The Amateur and the Professional
Twelve Original Photographs by Roger Fenton. University Library of
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 19 November 2008–31 January 2009
Drawing Class on the Roof. Budapest Schools in the Photographs of
Mór Erdélyi. Kiscell Museum, Budapest, 24 April 2008–10 August 2008.
During a recent reorganisation of the collection of old prints held by the
University Library of Budapest, a dozen photographs by Roger Fenton, one of
the pioneers of photography, came to light. In the 1850s Fenton took the new
technology of wet-plate photography to high levels of artistic achievement and
public visibility. In that decade he was the pre-eminent landscape and architectural
photographer in England and a founding member of the Royal Photographic
Society. His photography was many-sided: he made reproductions of
collections in the British Museum, took portraits of the Royal Family at Windsor
and at their country seat in Scotland and went to the Crimea to record a controversial
war. Fenton brought a painter’s eye to the new medium, enthusiastically
exploiting the new methods as they evolved. Most recently, a major exhibition of
his work was shown in the U.S. and London between 2004 and 2006.
Roger Fenton: Gillies at Balmoral, 1856. Photograph.
University Library of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Balmoral gillies also appear in the other group photographs in the holdings of the University Library.
Roger Fenton: Untitled, 1858. Photograph.
University Library of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Fenton's friend, Frank Dillon, the landscape painter, sat for a number of orientalising photographs. Dillon himself was interesting in the history of the East. On a Nile journey in the winter of 1854-5 he painted a number of watercolours of the ruins of Thebes, Karnak and Luxor.
[...]
Active for more than half a century, from around the turn of the nineteenth well
into the twentieth century, Mór Erdélyi (1866–1934) was one of the most prolific
of all Hungary’s photographers.
[...]
The Budapest History Museum, at its Kiscell
premises, documents a glorious chapter of
municipal history with more than 60 photographs
by Mór Erdélyi recording the outcome
of a huge construction programme of tenements,
residential housing and schools
between 1909 and 1912.
[...]
The big drive to boost the capital’s housing and school stock was very much a
pet project of István Bárczy (1866–1943). He first entered municipal service in
1889, and he was the city’s mayor for over a decade, from 1906 until 1917. One of
the pioneers of Hungarian urban policies in the modern era, he made sweeping
reorganisations of public transport and education in the capital, took the existing
utilities into city ownership, and took over direction of their further expansion.
He sought to create a sort of "urban welfare state" by following a crash
programme of social policies that were backed by a close institutional network.
To accomplish his ideas for the city’s development he leaned heavily on experts
committed to what was new and progressive in social thought in the early years
of the century. To outline his programme he turned to the findings of modern
demographic and sociological research, which shed light on various aspects of
urban life and living conditions—findings that found an outlet in a journal that he
founded under the title Városi Szemle (Urban Review).
Over the course of the nineteenth century the population of Buda and Pest
exploded more than fifteen-fold, from 60,000 to over one million, which meant
that by the beginning of the twentieth century addressing the city’s two most
pressing problems, the acute shortage of housing and schools, could be put off no
longer. Due to sky-high rents, the poorer end of the lower middle class and factory
workers were only able to find affordable accommodation in villages outside the
capital. The number of public elementary schools rose by some 50 per cent, from
55 to 77, between 1873 and 1880. Even so, by the start of the new century
education, too, was in an increasingly parlous state. An attempt was made to
alleviate the chronic shortage of schools by cramming children into ones that
were set up in the tenements; most of these fell far short of what was needed on
educational and public health grounds alike.
Mór Erdélyi: Drawing lesson at the school on Kertész Street, c. 1912.
Photograph. Matt collodion. Budapest History Museum, Kiscell Museum.
Júlia Papp
is an art historian. Her main interests are 18th–19th century Hungarian art (especially
graphic art) and 19th-century photography. Her most recent book is on the early
photography of artworks in Hungary.
