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Amateur photographers and their institutions in Transylvania before and after 1945

Granting institution: Hungarian Academy of Arts – Art Scholarship Program – Art Theory Section

Short description of the project

The history of Romanian photography has yet to be written, so we only have fragmented knowledge about the photo studios and photography societies operating in Transylvanian cities. Most of the work that has been done focuses on major figures (Ferenc Veress, Károly Szathmári Papp, Balázs Orbán, Samu Teleki). An exception to this is Csaba Miklósi Sikes's work Photographers and Studios in Transylvania, 1839-1916: Study and Document Collection (Székelyudvarhely: Haáz Rezső Foundation, 2001, 446 p.), but even this systematic work only covers the period up to 1916. A long-term research project could focus on uncovering and reviewing the missing data on the history of photography in Transylvania, using modern approaches. However, this is not possible as the result of three years of individual research, but only within the framework of a larger, group research project involving several experts. Although the long-term goal is the professional construction of a "grand history of photography," in this application I am thinking on a smaller scale, with the goal of uncovering further fragments and individuals.
Previous research on the history of photography and film in Transylvania has focused on certain periods, while others have been given less attention, resulting in a rather uneven knowledge of the creators and works of different periods, the relevant institutions, and the use and socio-historical background of the mediums of photography and film.

My research plan covers two such periods: the careers and self-organization of Transylvanian photographers between the two world wars, and amateur photography and narrow-gauge film after World War II, which were incorporated into the socialist system with new meanings and, according to Romanian socialist cultural policy, were intended to serve the education of the masses and the culture of the new man.
These two periods of social history can be placed among the three major regime changes of the twentieth century: the end of World War I and the minority status of Hungarians in Romania, the "class struggle" after World War II and the destruction of traces of bourgeois culture, the emergence of the working class, and the fall of the socialist state system with the regime change of 1989. As a result of these major social and ideological movements, photography was removed from the leisure activities of bourgeois culture and became an accessory of the working class and working-class culture. I would like to examine these two eras comparatively in my research, focusing on the personalities and micro-histories of photographers from each era and mapping the institutions and social embeddedness of the era through these creators. The research would look at the creators of the era and their unique "caste" system, within which they pursue photography as a profession, but also as a hobby (according to my hypothesis, in very different ways in the two eras).

Both theoretical research and fieldwork point out that the history of the domestication of individual media cannot be understood without the context of social history, nor without exploring the interaction and visual culture of the media characteristic of each era.
While contemporary media use involves the widespread and complex use of media (which is why the literature refers to it as the post-media era), if only through media convergence, earlier research has shown that before World War II, the economy of representational tools was characterized by a more intense interaction between fewer media: rather, writing and images (e.g., books, diaries, and family albums), painting, crafts, and photography, and later photography and film, were intertwined in user habits. In the post-World War II era, media use changed in many ways: central control, and censorship also meant control over the means of representation, so access to the media played out in a completely different way than in previous decades, but at the same time, the social stratification of image makers also changed, as the leisure activities of workers' clubs, which grew along with industrialization, often meant amateur creative clubs (popular art, folk art), and in this process, photography, filmmaking, and videography grew into branches that could be practiced at the hobby level, at home, among friends, in physics, chemistry, mechanics, or electronics.

Conference organization:
Work and Photography. Târgu Mureș, April 11, 2025, co-organized by the Mureș County Museum and KAB

Conference participation:

Blos Jáni Melinda: Family history wrapped in colors. An amateur photographer's color slides of Cluj between the two world wars. Presentation at the DIAlógus conference organized by the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography on the source value and research possibilities of slides and slide films. Budapest, December 4-5, 2015.

Melinda Blos-Jáni: Being a worker. The factory as a theme in Gáspár Török's photographs from around 1970. Presentation at the Work and Photography conference, Târgu Mureș, April 11, 2025.

Exhibition:

Reframing the Everyday. The Photographic Legacy of Gáspár Török

Visiting period: December 12, 2024 - April 13, 2025
Location: History Department (Marosvásárhely Castle)
Curators: Melinda Blos-Jáni, Mira Marincaș, Dorottya Újvári
Contributing students: Csaba Dénes, Lehel Fazakas, Róbert Pászka, Loretta Szatmári
Organizers: MureÈ™ County Museum - History Department, Sapientia EMTE, Transylvanian Audiovisual Association

What does a photographer's legacy, consisting of his own photographs and photo history collection, reveal about him? The digitization of Gáspár Török's (1934-2019) photographs provides an opportunity to understand the culture of photography in the city of Târgu Mureș. The self-taught photographer took pictures for decades as a hobby, consciously building his career as an amateur photographer within the framework of the József Marx Photo Club, and his pictures took him to international photo salons even during the socialist era. In his retirement, he devoted himself to the history of Transylvanian photography as a hobby. Thanks to his extensive photographic legacy, his work also becomes a subject of photographic history research in this exhibition. Gáspár Török enjoyed exhibitions and occasionally felt the need to show what he considered his most characteristic and successful works. In interviews, he often explained that "every ordinary thing that others just pass by can be interesting to me. You have to discover the uniqueness in it" (see Domokos Bölöni, Népújság, July 29, 1999, p. 5).

The phrase 'reframed everyday' in our title refers to this approach, while the curators of the exhibition also carry out a reframing. With full knowledge of the photographic legacy and by presenting the historical contexts of photography, we reframe the image that a photographer presents of himself in a creative exhibition and point out the possibilities that creative photography had during the socialist era, as well as the institutions, genres, and trends defined the images and participation of Romanian photographers in the "grand" history of photography.