Modern Slovak Photography 1925 – 1938
Aurel Hrabušický
Although we can hardly talk about photographic modernism in Slovakia as a programme movement, some elements of what László Moholy-Nagy called “objective seeing”1 and the theorist Franz Roh dubbed a “new, more exerted and more constructive seeing”2 were in their applied forms gradually penetrating the wider stream of ruralist photography3, discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, as well as the newly-forming social photography. What was this “new seeing” or “new vision” about?
In the context of European photography, the 1920s were a breakthrough period. (The situation was different in America, which had experienced the breakthrough sooner, after 1910.) An accumulation of photographic discoveries and their theoretical reflection led to establishing the key principles the medium of photography was based on, and which in fact were valid until the rise of digital photography. This resulted in a wide range of possibilities of using this medium. A lot of stress was being put on the fact that photography is not a mere copy, an impression of reality, but a creative act, firstly because of the very choice of objects to be photographed, secondly because the many possibilities of the viewing angle, photographic cut-out and lighting.4 Moholy-Nagy and other authors after him pointed out that even the so-called defective pictures, whether taken crosswise, or from bird´s- or worm´s-eye view, leading to various optical condensations, distortions, or even deformations, make a great contribution, since they bring a “pure optical image”5 and thus a new kind of visual experience, different from the usual visual perceptions. The “suggestion of images and visual ideas that had not been overcome for centuries”6 was thus cancelled. The new way of seeing together with new media discoveries (photogram, photomontage, typophoto, negative copy, solarization, sandwich) led to a new visual vocabulary of modern photography, from which individual elements could be taken out and connected in new contexts.
Apart from this, some people started to push through the idea that photography is more suitable for the needs of the new realistic art, as close to life as possible, because it is closer to the “realities of the modern technological world”, i.e. “industrial work, megalopoles, mass political movements, mass transport”7, than traditional art. That is one of the reasons why from the 1920s onwards, photographic record is, like never before, used and often abused as a graphic argument in political fights. Already László Moholy-Nagy listed political propaganda as one of the possible uses of photography.8 Photography as a tool of political propaganda looks for means of increasing its influence on the spectator, using the visual vocabulary of modernism. And that is when the modernist “structuring view”9 or the principle of “construction-deconstruction” is used.10 Optical deformation, even a disintegration of the original sensuous unity of phenomena lead to the rise of a new photogenic structure, the photographic image itself. The inner system of abstract forms and lines breaks through the photographically “found” section of reality, allowing its new reading.11
Another point to catch hold of in modern Slovak photography is again created, as was the case of Plicka’s fascination with the archaic Slovakia, as a secondary result of unartistic intentions. After all, modern photographers, in order to distinguish themselves from the supporters of pictorialist “salon” photography, who deliberately tried to be (finely) artistic, did not often want to be artistic photographers at all, calling themselves instead “photographic workers” or, as was the case of the Bauhaus, “clicking documentators”.12 If photography was to serve as a tool of social criticism within the newly originating “investigative journalism”, photographic perfectionism was not required.
The preceding lines prove the fact that the situation in Slovakia of photographic modernism as a document of the new seeing or of a structuring view, which itself would be its own purpose, was quite difficult. However, it started to improve around, and shortly after, 1930. Important roles were played by the stimuli, direct or indirect, of the Bauhaus, and of the School of Art Crafts (Škola umeleckých remesiel, ŠUR), founded in Bratislava in 1928. Although neither a classic art academy, nor a nonstandard art school of the Bauhaus type, this school, unprecedented in Slovakia, with its wide-spectral conception of teaching, stressing the close connection between the taught fields of study and modern standardized production, did have something in common with the Bauhaus. For the first time in Slovakia, photography, too, was taught at the school: in 1928 – 1931 in the department of advertising and typography, and from 1931 in an independent department led by Jaromír Funke. Although Funke had not studied directly at the Bauhaus, at that time he was already a respected representative of Czech photographic modernism, he knew the rules of the new seeing in photography very well, and he led his students in this spirit, too.
Although avant-garde trends in the 1910´s and 1920´s photography had not reached Slovakia, modern photography in the wider sense of this expression did gradually settle here, albeit with a delay. And it did so to a much higher degree than was supposed until recently.13 Recent research has brought more and more evidence of modern photographic thinking in Slovakia, and so the problem does not consist in the assumption that Slovak photography was a marginal phenomenon, but rather in the fact that the local cultural environment did not help either keep some sort of historical awareness of modern photography, or preserve its material artifacts.
But even in photographic modernism itself, apart from radical avant-garde manifestations, we can pinpoint two most important, originally conflicting trends, personified by two teachers working, although not simultaneously, but one after another, at the Bauhaus. On the one hand there was László Moholy-Nagy, for whom photography was not important in the traditional sense of the word, but as a document of the “new seeing”. On the other hand there was Walter Peterhans, an official photography teacher at the Bauhaus, who focused his attention in “a unit as wrapped up in itself as the theme of the still life”, combining “preciseness and sensitivity towards material with a sensitive feeling for composition”.14 Peterhans was de facto a supporter of the new materiality, a trend which had crystallized in the fine arts, and subsequently in photography, after 1925. According to Albert Renger-Patzsch, a representative of the new materiality in photography, the secret of a good photograph is its realism, e.g. an “absolutely faithful presentation of forms, which is capable of demonstrating the magical charm of matter”.15 Supporters of the new seeing did not find the technical perfection of a picture important, supporters of the new materiality, on the contrary, saw the technical perfection of photography as the basis of its effect.
As time went on, the unambiguousness of the two opinions gradually decreased, and in the 1930s we can talk of one continuous flow of modernism putting the virtues of both opinions to good use. Slovak photography can serve as a good example of this. Apart from the above-mentioned shots by Irena Blühová from fairs and markets, the first examples of the new seeing in photography were photographs by Ladislav Kožehuba from 1927. At that time, Koželuba worked in Prague, and it was probably the influence of the stimulating Prague environment that made him create a number of photographic series, which can already be considered as analytical studies in the spirit of the new materiality. Although the Street Scenes cycle, comprising several series (Sandmining, Repairing the Boat, Repairing the Façade) was based on photographs of various human work activities, humans themselves do not play an important role here, since the author photographs them from a distance, usually in half-units, from both bird´s- and worm´s-eye views. Nevertheless he is close enough to them to use a distorting perspective condensation. Figures are located in a constructive composition arrangement formed by mutually penetrating and crossing subject components of a working environment. Some of these shots can remind us of similar works by L. Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, or the Czech author Jan Lauschmann. They were all created in the same period, but compared with Kožehuba´s pictures are more affected by the picturesqueness of the fading pictorialism.
Some of Kožehuba´s series are based on a dominant motif, passing from one shot to another as a constant element (a river boat being repared, the underpass of a big building ended with a broken curve). There is a unique set called Small Transit. The author takes bird´s-eye-view photos of one and the same area, with people with full as well as empty wheelbarrows and carts moving about. The main theme is a picture of the unceasing human stir, creating a unit which later on would be called conceptual sequence, or sequence of time. Unlike in the case of the Repairing the Boat series, dominated by the big shape and physical materiality of the river boat, the author obviously does not worry about the technical perfection of the shots, which are often out of focus. Individual things are dominated by the author´s concept. It is symptomatic of Slovak culture that after his return to Slovakia, Kožehuba did not risk similar projects, although he became the successor of J. Funke in the photographic department of ŠUR after Funke left Bratislava in 1935.
Jozef Hofer started to work as a photographer-documentarist for Bratislava´s Municipal Museum in 1924. His role was to photographically document the town´s monuments and architecture, including buildings that were being built in the Bratislava between the two world wars. Although Hofer always stuck to his role of documentarist, his photographies show that he photographed elements of apparently utility architecture (town gasworks, slaughterhouse, stations transforming electricity) with a special interest. Thanks to his presentation, these elements became kind of monuments of modern civilization. Some elements of the new materiality were subtly applied in these photographies: precise presentation, angles of shots which on the one hand avoided modernist deflections, but on the other hand did not resort to conventional frontality either, the use of small supplemental forms bringing the necessary tension into the composition (a recently planted but already fenced little tree without leaves, in a completely different function than in Plicka´s A Little Boy with a Small Pipe, a chimney, a mast, a street-lights pylon, etc.). This understanding of peripheral, at first sight unattractive, elements of contemporary technological civilization, as well as their photographic evaluation, is one of the first manifestations of a matter-of-fact, civillist poetry in Slovak photography. Other authors would find themselves in the same position later on, and other documents of the new seeing would be created already in the 1930s.
Experimental photographic methods, known from the movement of European avant-gardes between the two world wars, appeared, albeit only marginally, in Slovak photography at the beginning of the 1930s. Only a number of works by Irena Blühová, created during her stay at the Bauhaus (1931 – 1932) could be called truly experimental. Apart from the Experiments series, i.e. experiments with the developing process, part of school exercises, these were especially the doubled self-portraits, results of the overlapping of two negatives and a kind of net arrangement. They are de facto “double-portraits of Irena and Imro (Weiner-Kráľ – note A. H.) from two negatives, highlighting the bipolar presence of the female and the male principle”.16 Unlike its female counterpart, the male face is open as if about to shout. Thanks to their surreal nature, these double-portraits remind us of similar creations by Hannah Hoch and Wanda Wulz.
After returning from the Bauhaus, Irena Blühová sporadically tried another genre that could have been called experimental back then: a series of male nudes of I. Weiner-Kráľ was created in 1933. In the conservative Slovak environment, which until the 1960s witnessed practically no manifestation of such a classic photographic genre as female nudes, this was a truly unique attempt.
In 1932 – 1933, Sergei Protopopov created a series of microphotographs of timber species for the school of forestry in the town of Banská Štiavnica. It was probably because he found their visual effect so interesting that he gradually created exhibition enlargements from them, as a kind of abstract photographs. They come in rectangular cuts as well as in circular formats adequate to the original image under the objective of a microscope. Microphotographs upgraded to an artistic artifact are nothing special in world photography. Protopopov, however, deliberately used this method to create unique abstract photographs from the combinations of various net and cellular structures, or from crossing regular and irregular fibres.
Besides Irena Blühová, Ladislav Foltyn, too, studied at the Bauhaus in 1929 – 1932. After finishing his studies he became a well-known architect and historian of modern arhcitecture, but his photographic works, in which he improved under the tuition of W. Peterhans, was virtually unknown until recently. In his own words, he was influenced by Peterhans for the rest of his life. His character was well suited by “Peterhans´s example of a calm, material and contemplative mirroring of the objective world.”17 The motivic repertoir of his still lifes, created during his studies at the Bauhaus, is rather limited and partly corresponds with the repertoir of his teacher, who also used music paper and various scraps of organic material or fabrics with fan-shaped and feather-shaped structures in his compositions. When compared to Peterhans´s picturesque compositions, making full use of contrasts and reflexes of various materials, Foltyn´s still lifes give a more reserved impression. According to I. Mojžišová, “the reserve that can be seen in the theme took over the other elements of photography, too… There was nothing that would dynamize the image”. Instead of diagonals, the pictures were commanded by “a rectangular view of Foltyn the architect, dominated by horizontal and vertical lines…”18 Even the photograph of a tuning fork seemingly hanging above a notation of Bach´s sonata, called Self-portrait (1929-1930), not only with its strict choice of pictorial elements, but also with the contrast of two levels of signs – the objective sign and the sign system of the notation – as well as the stressed meaningfulness of the statement, supported by the “autobiographical” title, makes this extraordinary composition different from Peterhans´s.
Foltyn had a special relationship to objects of smooth folded lines of seemingly organic origin (but not of fin-de-siecle origin!), probably again caused by his musical inclination. These forms were applied in the autobiographical photograph My Violin as well as in shots with themes perhaps less poetic, but including the above-mentioned “repetitive beauty” of piled up industrial products or semi-finished articles (On the building site, 1929). In the shot of piled up chairs from the Vienna Prater (1933), the lightly distorting optics transforms a system of mainly rectangular lines into a dynamic system of curves. Even later on, Foltyn created noteworthy photographs of constructions and objective groupings in the spirit of the new materiality, but works created during the time he spent studying at the Bauhaus have remained his greatest contribution to modern Slovak photography.
Another two authors, until recently unknown, who make us careful when judging the character and range of modern photography in Slovakia are the Kiefer brothers, Emil and Ladislav, non-professional photographers from the town of Kežmarok. According to recent findings of Jozef Ridilla, both brothers documented various aspects of life in Kežmarok between the two world wars. So far, their works have not been studied enough to be judged properly. What we know for sure is that whereas Ladislav, the younger brother, focused rather on report photographs of the street bustle in the town, Emil documented (whether on someone´s order or not is not known) the shopwindows of Kežmarok shops. It seems that Emil Kiefer was attracted by the charm of the unwanted, radiating from the bizarre scrums of objects and texts situated in the shopwindows. J. Ridilla says they remind him of similar photographs by Eugen Atget and Jindřich Štyrský.19
The most consistent follower of the new seeing in Slovakia was Miloš Dohnány, a participant in Funke´s evening courses at the ŠUR. He, too, was only a part-time photographer, although his job was partly connected with his photographic interests. Like Funke, Dohnány, too, was interested not only in photographing itself but also in its theoretical, technological and organizational background. That is why he organized photographic workshops for amatuers, especially for his colleagues from the YMCA photoclub, and wrote articles and exhibition reviews for a number of periodicals (Lidové noviny, Fotografický obzor, Nový svet, Panoráma, Náš film, Krásy Slovenska). In some magazines he led regular guidance columns for photoamateurs.
In connection with Dohnány we should mention the fact that although no specialized photography magazines were published in Slovakia between the two world wars, and the Czechoslovak periodicals of this type, published in Bohemia, promoted articles and photographs from Slovakia with very low frequency, the 1930s nevertheless substantially broadened the possibilities of publishing high-quality photographs in illustrated magazines, such as Nový svet, Krásy Slovenska, Panoráma, etc.
We are often reminded that Dohnány´s works were fundamentally influenced by his teacher Funke. Surely, Dohnány´s works, especially those created during school exercises, will include some immediate responses to Funke´s stimuli. Antonín Dufek, for example, mentions the fact that one of the key themes of Funke´s exercises was Object in Space, derived from his early still lifes with balls, cubes, paper and glass oblongs and squares.20 Although Dohnány´s works from the times of evening courses at the ŠUR include also some still lifes of this type, a series of still lifes and details of various surfaces and structures of materials, often, especially in 1932 – 1934, transparent, shows that the author arrived at individual solutions. In these pictures, Dohnány managed to arrange the contrasts of variously structured surfaces and to multiply their visual effect by a game of concentrated and dispersed light reflexes. He also created still lifes with objects of contrasting shapes combined with fragmentary texts, in which he seems to have tried to project a penetration of chaotic mass into an ordered textual arrangement. This composition principle could remind us of Cubist collages, but Dohnány chooses such a range of objectivity that serves best for the demonstration of the new photographic seeing. Some shots are of great details fully distinguishing the structure of material objetcs reflected on their surfaces. Moreover, the basic photographic drawing is enriched with various proportions and intensities of light reflexes bound to different rates of transparency of the photographed matters, something that only photography can bring. That is why not only Dohnány but also other photographers of this orientation often choose objects and matters with transparent or semi-transparent surfaces and netted, openwork patterns. These works seem to be perfect examples of Franz Roh´s observation about a “specific attractiveness” of some sorts of still lifes, resulting from “a tension between the geometric abstraction and the aftermath of objectivity”.21 Suitable themes, however, do not necessarily have to come from the usual objective range of still lifes only. A good example is a semi-detail shot of a weir with discontinuous, blackened flows of water rushing above a riverbed that shows through, suddenly bending at weir level and immersing in twilight after the slant. The diagonal of the slant sharply divides the area of the photo into two triangular parts, and the moving contact areas of the two elements, water and earth, make the geometric composition scheme more vivid.
Like many of his colleagues from the YMCA photoclub, Dohnány, too, was interested in elements typical for contemporary town life (we cannot talk of the bustle of a city, because at that time not even Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak “country”, was a city). Themes of some photographs seem to be influenced by Hofer, others are already typical of Dohnány – station waiting rooms (as architecture rather than as a meeting point of people), bank halls, bus platforms. The matter of the roof part of a bus (perhaps the first regular line between Bratislava and the nearby town of Šamorín) with a mighty radiator shield seems as if it was cutting into the matter of a funcionalist building in the background.
Dohnány´s portraits are unique in the context of Slovak photography. Usually diagonally composed semi-figures, they are situated in a background reduced to a very small number of all the more expressive elements. Even a working theme as traditional as that of a mower grinding his scythe was upgraded to a modernist exhibition by Dohnány. In counterlight and from a lateral worm´s-eye view, the scythe with an additional tool for raking grass turns into a menacingly branched tool with blades aimed at the mower, who confronts all this threatening with nothing but a pipe lifted in his mouth.
Dohnány´s inspirative example contributed a lot to the creative atmosphere in the YMCA photoclub, whose other members developed other individual elements of modern photography. For example, the theme of the modern portrait was enriched by Juraj Jurkovič´s Double-portrait. The profiles of a young couple on a beach are arranged so that they create a parabolic curve in the composition, rising towards the upper left corner of the picture. The works of another important photographer from the YMCA circle, Jaroslav Horák, who had to leave Slovakia for the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia after the split of Czechoslovakia in1938, is so far known only from reproductions in magazines. His detail and semi-detail shots from the area of sport, games and other ways of relaxation also form part of the newly forming lifestyle of town people (after all, the unemployed and the homeless, sitting on the kerb and similar put-aside places, were not the only people living in towns). One of Horák´s best photographs of this kind has the symptomatically optimistic name of The Tennis Season Has Begun. We will recall the fact that Bazovský´s photographs included not only themes like Picking Potatoes and similar ones, but surprisingly also shots from tennis courts.
Perhaps the best-known supporter of Dohnány´s photographic opinions was the somewhat younger Viliam Malík. The best of his photographic documents of the new seeing were those where he could use his feeling for photographing architectural elements. These included not only standard functionalist buildings but also a tall pylon with a bronze heraldic lion as part of a monument to general Milan Rastislav Štefánik on top of it (the monument had a sad destiny – the lion disappeared in no time, and Štefánik´s statue followed a couple of years later); the steel gate of one of the first Slovak hydrocentres near the village of Ladce; or shots from deserted concrete border forts and barricades with barbed wire. Photographed from a diagonal worm´s-eye view, the naturalist bronze lion absurdly bares its teeth from a pylon too high; one of the last rafters has just about enough time to slip through the mighty portals of the hydrocentre, the steel gate to the new metal era; arranged parts of barricades, profiled metal bars and a spiderweb from barbed wire, all perfectly illuminated with lateral light, resemble the neat, regular rows in the nearby vineyards.
Like Hofer before him, Malík had a special understanding for photographing industrial buildings. He could capture the almost majestic loneliness of these industrial megaliths, rising against the background of the empty sky to such a degree that they could be viewed as some sort of predecessors of the later photographic series of blast furnaces and oil towers by Bernhard and Hilla Becher.
The principles of modern photography settled in our cultural environment in the 1930s to such a degree that they partly influenced even the works of such normally traditionalist authors as Karol Plicka and Ján Halaša. Plicka was so much interested in the conical and parabolic shapes of lined up piles of drying flax that he dedicated an entire series of shots to them, without obviously balancing them with human figures, as was his practise. These pictures radiate an aesthetic “end in itself” of the new seeing. The regular objective raster from piles of flax stands out against the background of irregular cloud formations, more typical of Plicka. Despite this fact, this series cannot be listed within the context of Plicka´s more traditionally framed landscape works.
Similarly, some photographs of summer and winter countryside by Ján Halaša from 1935 – 1936 engage one´s attention with their deliberate and obvious distinguishing of variously structured areas as land-forming elements, united by an expressive line meandering towards the background of the shot. The problem of landscape formulated this clearly and apparently makes rare appearances in Halaša´s works, nevertheless it forms a kind of intermediate stage on the way towards the more expressive works of Skřipský, Grossmann, Martinček and other photographers after World War II.
Another photograph inspired by Funke´s work at Bratislava´s
ŠUR was the well-known picture of Pavol Poljak, often published perhaps also
because of its symptomatic name A Study from the School of Professor
Funke (1932 – 1933). The shot of a pile of lined up bottles turned
upside down owes its effect to an expressive perspective condensation. It
resembles Kollar´s picture of the Pottery Market in Vallauris,
created in about the same time, but in a place hundreds of miles away. The
similarity is nothing but a proof of the stabilization of the motive
repertoir of photographic modernism. Kollar´s shot from the building of the
ocean-going steamer Normandia (1932) proves that his monumentalizing
view, in this case also an extreme worm´s-eye view, applied equally to
working men as to their products. If not long ago, Kožehuba´s riverboat
meant something, the size and mass of this colossus, whose shape in Kollar´s
view rises steeply upwards only to be ended with an energetic cut, give an
almost gigantic impression. It is a proof of the cult of power and unlimited
human opportunities that was spreading across Europe (a sequence with a huge
steamer in Fellini´s well-known film Amarcord gives a similar
impression) only to terminate in World War II.
Notes:
1) Moholy-Nagy, L.: Malerei.
Fotografie. Film. Florian Kupferberg, meinz 1967, p. 26. Fascimile of the
original edition from 1927.
Frizot, M. and coll.: La Nouvelle histoire de la Photographie. Bordas, paris 1994, p. 457 - 486. Eng. version new History of Photography. Köneman, Köln 1998, p. 457 - 467.
2) Roh, F.: quoted work, p. 5, 10, 15. The translation of Roh’s term “neue Sehen“ later probably led to the derived expression “new vision“, which caught on in the historiography of photography.
3) A term coined by Ľudovít Hlaváã in the publication Sociálna fotografia na Slovensku. Pallas, Bratislava, 1974, p. 62.
4) Roh, F.: quoted work, p.5, 10, 15.
5) Moholy Nagy, L.: quoted work, p. 26.
6) Ibid, p. 26 - 27
7) Frizot, M. and coll.: La Nouvelle histoire de la Photographie. Bordas, paris 1994, p. 457. Eng. version new History of Photography. Koneman, Koln 1998, p. 457
8) Moholy Nagy, L.: quoted work, p. 33.
9) Frizot, M.: quoted work, p. 464.
10) Ibid, p. 474.
11) In this context it is interesting that the question of what photography meant to the “Bauhauslers“ was answered by one of them, Herbert Mayer,in the following way: “To us, photography was a translation of reality into a legible image“. In: Herzogenrath, W.: quoted work, p. 9.
12) Herzogenrath, W.: Bauhausfotografie. Institut für Auslandbeziehungen, Bonn 1996, p. 9.
13) Ľ. Hlaváč, focused more on social photography, more or less marginalized Slovak photographic modernism in his historiographic conception. Not long ago, Vladimír Birgus mentioned sporadic manifestations of Jaromír Funke’s influence on the “otherwise very traditionally oriented Slovak photography of the 1930s“. Cf: Birgus, V. and coll.: âeská fotografická avantgarda 1918 1938. Kant, Praha 2000, p.20.
14) Herzogenrath, W.: quoted work, p. 21.
15) Frizot, M.: quoted work, p. 464 - 465.
16) Mojžišová, I. In: Irena Blühová (1991), quoted work, p. 32.
17) Mojžišová, I.: Ladislav Foltyn’s belated debut. Imago, 2001, No. 12, p. 13.
18) Ibid, p. 15
19) Quoted after written information of Jozef Ridilla for the author of the text.
20) Dufek, A.,: Der pedagoge Funke and das Bauhaus. In: Anna, S. and coll.: Bauhaus im Osten. Verlag Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern bei Stuttgart, 1997, p. 135.
21) Roh, F.: quoted work, p. 5, 10, 15.
