He has been protesting ever since he first put his hands on a camera. Sometimes against the narrow-minded-ness of a political regime, other times against the obso-lete conservatism of the genre, or the limitations of the imaging method he himself pursues. The photographs that are the fruit of this long succession of rebellions constitute the most significant corpus of his oeuvre. Let us catalogue his protests, and by the time we reach the end, the path of his photographic career will be nicely delineated. I promise. The first traces remain obscured by the mist of the past, but he was six when his brother taught him how to take and develop photos. Whether he was already a rebel then, ask him – I have no informa-tion – but soon he was 13, and on 2 November 1956, he and his uncle perambulated his motherland, the 8th District, taking snapshots of the locations that had just been tormented by revolutionary battles. Every day they
had listened to the sound of gunfire and explosions, but when weapons fell silent on the first day of November, they believed it was over and the revolution had won.
That was why his parents let him out to take photographs with the Taxona his brother lent him. A few years later, he developed 15 of these photographs for a high school classmate, and with the passing of time, somehow for-got about it. Around the same time, Haris joined a Cath-olic hiking section that was under constant surveillance by State Security from the 1960s, so it was justified for him to assume after the arrest of some of his mates, that sooner or later their house would be searched, as well. Therefore, he took precautions by burning all his negatives and prints from the time of the revolution. For some reason, however, they escaped vexation. He later conceded that his fear-borne deed was uncalled for. But who can tell the future in such taut situations? The story
would end here, with acquiescence that along with so many other photographs, these also faded into oblivion, had there not been an exhibition in 2005 in Kolta Gallery, featuring Haris’s photos of Transylvania. Their vernissag-es being a little out of the ordinary, the author took part in a public discussion with a moderator of his choice, and this was when Haris recounted the story of his photos of 1956. Within three months, the former classmate showed up with the photographs he had once received. They were miraculously preserved and recovered, but it was not a miracle that the large digital prints made from the small photographs were exhibited on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, in 2006, in the Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle Bu-dapest and in the Ernst Museum, as well as in Vienna and Washington.
Let us leap ahead a few years. The next chapter of Haris’s rebellion is dated circa 1967. For what else would it qualify as, when a student of mechanical engineer-ing starts acquaintengineer-ing and befriendengineer-ing contemporary artists all of a sudden? And not just any artists – here are a few names for good measure: Viola Berki, Attila Csáji, Sándor Csutoros, István Demeter, Béla Fekete Nagy, Tihamér Gyarmathy, Béla Kondor, Dezső Korniss, Tamás Lossonczy… I don’t know what happened during these meetings and talks, but it is certain that Haris soon joined the Hungarian avant-garde scene and par-ticipated in the legendary Szürenon exhibition of 1969 in Budapest. For younger readers: the group coined its name from the words surreal and nonfigurative in the heyday of Social Realism, or “socreal”, when any art-work other than those based on the principles dictated by prevailing ideology was at best tolerated, but there were worse cases. This was where Haris exhibited his first independent artwork. Ten years later, the group or-ganised an anniversary exhibition. The opening speech was delivered by art historian, László Beke. Haris had made a life-sized photograph of Beke, recorded the Haris László: Szembesítés, kettős portré,
Csutoros Sándor, 1973, giclée nyomat, 60 x 84 cm László Haris: Confrontation, Dual Portrait, Sándor Csutoros, 1973. giclée print, 60 x 84 cm
162HARIS LÁSZLÓ 163LÁSZLÓ HARIS opening speech on tape, and in fact, it was Beke’s
pho-tographic image that opened the exhibition, saying that the photograph substitutes reality… Meanwhile, the flesh-and-blood Beke was standing idle next to his im-age. “Szürenon was an amiable company of autonomous individuals working and thinking together in an artistic collective. The key organiser of the group was Attila Csáji, and it included István Haraszty, Gábor Karátson, Gyula Pauer, Péter Prutkay and Péter Türk – in other words, many of today’s significant artists practically started their career with Szürenon. I was not involved in organ-ising this group: I was invited by Attila Csáji to partici-pate in their exhibition. In the late sixties, the young art scene of Budapest was comprised of two large, equally active, but different and independent artist collectives:
IPARTERV on the one hand, which included, among oth-ers, Imre Bak, Miklós Erdély, György Jovánovics, Dezső Korniss, and László Lakner, and Szürenon on the other.
The two groups did not overlap, but the 1970 exhibition in Building R was organised co-operatively by the two collectives”. (Fotóművészet, 2002, issue 3-4.)
Haris was featured in this collaborative exposition with IPARTERV, as well as in the exhibition of No. 1 Group at the Lion Rock in the Budapest Zoo, together with Kálmán Kecskeméti, László Deák, György Konecsni, András Orvos, György Szemadám, and others. Arriving in great numbers at the opening, the audience could see sculptures, paintings, and Haris’s large photograph of 2x1 metres, while delicate noses were disturbed by the pungent lion smell. “There was the No. 1 Group, of which I was also a member. In 1970 (here the artist’s memory fails, as the show was in 1971), we had an exhibition at the Zoo, where György Szemadám worked as an animal attendant. The interior of the lion’s cave, which is prac-tically an artificial rock, was used as junk storage, and we fixed it up. There was no air conditioning whatsoever;
it was as clean as we could manage, practically com-pletely unsuitable for an exhibition. But its unsuitability was at once infused with another meaning: that we had an opportunity to intervene”. (Fotóművészet, ibid.) These exhibitions were primarily comprised of fine art pieces, Haris being the only photographer among them, who had tried being part of the official photographic scene as a member of MADOME, the Art Photography Asso-ciation of Hungarian Workers, but as he revealed, he was bored to death among the photographers who could only discuss their cameras, lenses, and other such very important matters. For a long time, he avoided gather-ings of photographers; in other words, he confined
him-self to the periphery of the photography scene. However, being a social person, he found his place among artists and filmmakers. This point will re-surface as a refer-ence frequently, later on.
Let us leave Haris rebel in peace… Of course, we will keep an eye on his pursuits. We are now at 1970: this was when his first individual exhibition opened at the dormitory of the Budapest Technical University, at the junction of Irányi and Budafoki Roads. With his large photographic prints of details of paintings by his friends and acquaintances, he surprised part of the audience and the entire profession, who were used to different kinds of photos at this time. This was when Haris came upon one of the fundamental themes of his oeuvre: he photographed details and produced macro enlarge-ments of the paintings of his fellows (first Attila Csáji, followed by István Demeter, József V. Molnár, and later Dezső Korniss). According to Haris, this was part of a meditative process, a search among the shapes of an artificial, yet autonomously forming scene. I also think it is irrelevant whether a photographer finds the details that interest him in the landscape surrounding him, that correspond to reality in scale, or does the same using a canvas and macro enlargement, re-interpreting the blots of image applied by the painter. After long contem-plation, he selected small details a few centimetres in diameter, enlarging them into often one by two metre prints. To him, the large size was important, or more precisely, the freedom of the photographer to choose the image size that articulates his piece best. (At the time, the average and expected exhibition size of pho-tographs was 30x40 cm.) He made the first close-ups in 1967, and he was confessedly influenced by the pho-tographs of György Lőrinczy, one of the defining figures of Hungarian avant-garde photography, of pieces of goo and frozen shapes, as well as by Csaba Koncz’s icon-like photograms of discarded agricultural tools and ob-jects. “It is fine art and film in which I found the intel-lectual atmosphere where I feel comfortable, and which I feel is important and should be one’s preoccupation in these times. This is why I rather acquainted myself with fine artists, who became my friends, and these col-lective influences are now often unavoidable. Imagine an atmosphere where Herbert Read’s books, Modern Painting and Modern Sculpture were passed on secretly as Samizdat literature. We were reading Vasarely repro-duced with stencils. These were the tangible, real pieces of free intellect. Attila Csáji’s paintings led me to realise that it is worthwhile to photograph paintings. I saw them,
understood them, and thought it would also be interest-ing photographically if I viewed details of them as au-tonomous images. At the time, I was looking for details that had independent meanings from the original piece.
Those photos were still slightly independent of me, and they were not a little dependent on Attila Csáji. All this matured into an independent work of art when I found those important details in the paintings, which form a transition between details applied by the painter on the canvas, and those that “came into being”. I was looking for the harmony that is the result of nature and the work of man intervening into nature. I find these, regardless of the painter’s technique, in tiny details of one-two cen-timetres or smaller. They still bear a human trace, but this is apparently not important. What is important is the creation of harmony from the collaboration of man and nature. I have a photograph from that time, entitled The highest good is like water. This is a quote from Lao Tzu. One of the fundaments of my photography is the infinity of the world; the world is infinite in all directions, upwards and downwards, and you can find what is most important to you everywhere”. (Fotóművészet, ibid., pp.
3-16.)
Let us move on along the way of the rebel! In 1970, he was among the founding members of the Creative Group of the Balatonboglár Chapel Exhibitions (Ferenc Balogh, Attila Csáji, György Galántai, József Magyar, József V. Molnár, József Tóth). Not only was he an exhib-iting participant of those shows, but also a documenter of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde events of the 1970s.
“The Balatonboglár Chapel Exhibitions started in 1970.
Surprisingly, the first year turned out fantastic. State Security was slow to respond. The first article to attack the exhibition based on directions from above came out as late as 1971, in the people’s regional weekly, Somogyi Néplap. A journalist called Barna Horányi was commis-sioned to write about the monstrosities that had taken place there. This article bore the title, “Illegal Ways of Some Avant-gardes”, and discussed what a disgrace it was that there had been no jurying and state approval for the exhibits, and how intolerable that was. This arti-cle inspired my photograph, and a poster made from it, which was exhibited in Boglár in the next years. I tore Haris László: Jel és Árnyék I.–V., 1975
giclée nyomat, 5 db 59 x 53 cm
László Haris: Sign and Shadow I-V, 1975 giclée print, 5 pieces 59 x 53 cm
164HARIS LÁSZLÓ 165LÁSZLÓ HARIS the article out of the paper and folded it to show the
headline, and jammed it thus into my friend József Mol-nár’s mouth”. (Interview by Ádám Urbán with Haris, at Urbán’s 2012 Role Models exhibition.) This poster was is-sued much later by Artpool as a commemorative stamp for Balatonboglár. In 1973, he spent the summer again in Balatonboglár, and of course, he was present when an armed military unit took over the former chapel and walled up its doors. With a little cynicism, one thought that the thing would have run out of steam in a few years anyway, had it not been forcefully shut down. For those devoid of cynicism, let us note that this attack was out-rageous and unprecedented, even by the standards of the time. “Imagine a theatre show going on, and you suddenly hear engine noise, two trucks climbing up the hill, one full of armed soldiers, the other full of building materials, bricks, lime and sand. As soon as everyone was expelled from the chapel, they literally walled up the door with bricks and mortar. There were artworks, clothes and personal belongings inside. Besides, the chapel had a perfectly lockable and strong grating to protect it”. (Fotóművészet, ibid.) The working title of his diptych exhibited here on this occasion was Requiem for the Chapel, which got the title Confrontation at the exhi-bition. He exhibited the fingerprints of Sándor Csutoros and his wife, in two huge enlargements. “I had two adja-cent photographs in the shrine of the chapel, 70x100 cm each. Let me tell a story about them: Sándor Csutoros’s wife, Dr Zsuzsa Markó, was the victim of a show trial and had to go to prison around that time. I don’t know if you have heard about the doctors’ trial of Gyöngyös, which took place in the mid-60s, as a late, primitive, provin-cial imitation of the great Soviet Doctor’s plot. Zsuzsa worked as a young neurologist in Gyöngyös. One sum-mer at a house party, one of the nurses got so drunk that she was taken to hospital by ambulance, but there were no free beds except in the psychiatry ward. She had so-bered up by morning, dressed up and went home, no big deal. However, two years later a lover or friend of hers, a major at Internal Affairs, who had heard that a Doctor’s plot needed to be arranged in Hungary too, caused an enormous landslide that essentially revealed the moral cesspool that Hungarian doctors allegedly lived in. The trial lasted for years, and the Supreme Court acquitted the culprits three times. However, the trial was held a fourth time and finally in 1973, they dealt out baffling sentences. The chief physician got 8 years, Zsuzsa as a minor culprit got a year and a half. The photo of the Csutoros’s dyed fingertips was taken a few days after
Zsuzsa’s appeal was rejected, a week before she had to move in to the prison. It was exhibited as a wedding pho-tograph, a marital double portrait”. (Fotóművészet, ibid.) The strings were pulled by the party centre. For those who are interested, and believe they find some random, but really just incidental correspondence in the flow of events, the entire documentation is to be found in Györ-gy Galántai’s Artpool archive.
Apparently, 1973 was a good year for rebellion. Before the aforementioned Chapel exhibition, in May, Csutoros, József V. Molnár and Haris arranged a staircase show in the quite worn-down staircase of Erkel Street 12 in the 9th District of Budapest. This was where Molnár lived, and he installed large prints of the letters O and A, while Haris exhibited life-size photographs, and Csutoros hung strings of coloured spheres through several sto-reys. A publication was also issued with 10 inserts. The opening featured a select audience, including, if I re-member well, Gyula Pauer, Szemadám, Ottó Mezei and Róbert Kassay. “In 1973, Csutoros, Molnár and I decided to secede from the exhibition space, which would prob-ably be shut down shortly anyway. There was a rule in those times that only juried material could be shown at a fine art exhibition. But what was an exhibition? There were specific criteria, such as: an exhibition lasts more than three days. Anything shorter is just a presentation – which we were allowed to organise. It was our objec-tive to do something that would appear as a collecobjec-tive artwork. It should not be about friends, enemies or art-ists barely tolerating each other showing their works next to one another, but to fashion the space together in a collective artwork. Actually, there is only a single art-work, the presentation itself, where everyone does what they do best, and everyone speaks the language they can speak without stuttering. Csutoros made a sculp-ture, Molnár made prints, and I made photographs, but it was a single work of art. I had photographed the base-ment door, made a life-size enlargebase-ment and pinned it back to the door whence it had been taken. The point was that it depends on you, what becomes an artwork in your environment. The picture calls upon you to look around, you are free: anything can become an artwork at your touch. This is also why we were not looking for a gallery space: this door is here, and it can be opened.
There was another meaning to this thought, that the art-work is not identical to the original, as in reality, light-ing conditions are completely different, the sun rises, it runs its course, sets, then the lights are switched on, lights constantly change in the staircase. The
photo-graph, however, has fixed lighting, and this is how the variable and the constant confront each other. Similarly, I photographed the landing, and then the wooden stairs leading to the attic beyond an open door, which I pinned to the closed door, cutting a 20-cm-wide strip from the top to make it clear that the door is closed. If you walked through the stations, an opportunity revealed itself, that you could enter the closed door, it all depended on you”.
(Fotóművészet, ibid.)
The third collective exhibition of Csutoros, Molnár and Haris took place at the Technical University’s E Club.
A theatre spotlight illuminated a black square, on which the blinding circle of light appeared as the symbol of escape, of breaking out. The spheres of Csutoros were filled with varying amounts of water, and so they served as lenses. In Haris’ photo series, entitled Blow-Up, a man was standing on a hillside, in a 1x1 m enlargement.
He took a 20x20 cm detail of this photo and enlarged it further into 1x1 m, revealing a multitude of new infor-mation. He then enlarged a 20x20 detail of this other photograph, showing only the face. The image now
He took a 20x20 cm detail of this photo and enlarged it further into 1x1 m, revealing a multitude of new infor-mation. He then enlarged a 20x20 detail of this other photograph, showing only the face. The image now