Photographs in the museums: from a document to work of art
MúzeumCafé 5.
The number of photographs in Hungary’s public collections can only be estimated. Today roughly ten million pictures made by some type of phototechnical procedure are held in museum collections.
For many museums photographs primarily represent documents – carriers of a theme relevant to the collection and research of a given institution. The Petőfi Literary Museum, for example, has about 30,000 photographs of Hungarian writers or events and locations connected to them; the Pannonhalma Abbey’s collection has about 100,000 pictures depicting the life of the order from the 1850s to the present. Yet these photographic collections are also rather volatile. Their storage requires appropriate conditions – constant temperature and humidity, dust-free air in the case of negatives, etc. – and their restoration calls for special experts.
The first photographic show in Hungary, the Amateur Photographic Exhibition, opened in the old Kunsthalle on 1 May 1880. On 1 January 1941 Ervin Kankowszky and István Kerny founded the Hungarian Photographic Museum. However, this was not an independent organisation, nor did it have its own premises, so in reality it existed only on paper.
Hungarian Photographic Museum
Exactly half a century had to pass after 1941 before the Hungarian Photographic Museum opened in Kecskemét in December 1991. This is the only national institution involved in collecting, keeping and exhibiting exclusively photographs, as well as objects and documents related to photography. Today the museum, housed in a former postal carriage station and later synagogue, has about one million pictures, both negative and positive, (including the 73,000 items of the Photo-Historic Collection gathered by the Hungarian Photographers’ Association since 1958).
The Historical Photographic Collection of the Hungarian National Museum
Hungary’s largest historical photographic collection has around 1.3 million pictures of which 350,000 are recorded individually, while the rest are filed in chronological order and thematically. The oldest item in the collection is a daguerreotype, which was acquired by the museum in 1874, but besides this several dozen photographs made with the early technique are in the possession of the museum. They feature forty portraits identifiable by name, including one of Lajos Kossuth. The collection also contains about 40,000 filed portraits taken by prominent photographers such as Aladár Székely, Olga Máté and Dénes Rónai of, for example, Hungarian writers and poets, including Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Margit Kaffka and Lajos Kassák.
From the Hermitage to the Museum of Fine Arts
Photography is increasingly playing an important role as serious art in the world’s museums. For example, on 7 June this year the Hermitage Amsterdam, a branch of the St. Petersburg State Hermitage Museum, opened a large photographic exhibition with the title ‘Images of St. Petersburg’, which displays the life of the city in pictures taken in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection of the world’s leading Russian museum mostly contains photographs from the period between 1840 and 1920, primarily those collected by Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, which had been kept in the Winter Palace.
The first photographic exhibition in Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts, ‘Soul and Body – from Kertész to Mapplethorpe, through the eyes of the greatest masters of photography’, can be seen from 6 June 2008.