Repub-lic and I worked on a report for them about the coun -tries along the Dniester River. I was paired up with an Ukrainian cameraman, and they took us in an army jeep to where the fighting was. On our way I spotted a very interesting sculpture: it was of a Russian pioneer with the white dove of peace in his hands, but someone put a combat helmet on his head, just as a joke I guess. It struck me that this sums up the whole situation per-fectly. I stopped the car, but the second we pulled over, they opened fire on us. Our driver was shot in the leg and there were bullets flying all around us. That was a scary feeling. For the first time in my life, I was a living target.
“We were lucky, because the statue stood on a small mound, so we ran behind it to take cover. We managed to drag the driver with us, but our car was shot to pieces by the trigger-happy Romanians in Moldova. We had to wait for a good hour until the Russians heard the gun-shots and came to pick us up in a bulletproof vehicle and after some shooting they drove us to safety. This was the riskiest situation in my life”. (Ferenc Markovics:
“Conversation with András Bánkuti”, in Fotóművészet, 2004. 1-2. pp. 18-32)
Numerous books and exhibitions prove that his work deserves our attention. Take a look at his 2003 book, en-titled Outer Values or three years later the book People in the Soviet and Russian World with many hundred colour and black-and-white images. I will not try to convince you any further, but you might like to know what Mihaly Gera had to say: “András Bánkuti is brilliant at capturing the essence of a one-time event, creating a universally valid symbol. As a photojournalist, he always uses clean
compositions, meaning that he never stages a scene, but always finds it. He is always prepared and aware of the situation, to the extent where he sees beyond the immediate and recognises the greater correlations: he always strives to capture these in a picture, this being his main focus. (“Bongeszde” [Gleaner], in: FotoVideo 2003, no. 9, p. 20)
Try to recall his photo of Kádár’s funeral taken from above, where he shows an old man in the crowd looking much like Kádár himself, looking into the future anx-iously. As if he had a premonition about something that we already know. According to Iván Bächer: Bánkuti, the quotidian photographer, for the past two decades has
been at all the places where someone or something was falling apart, separated, united, ended, died, began, resurrected, kicked the bucket or was buried”. (“Napi-fotos” [Everyday Photographer], Népszabadság, 15 Nov.
2003). Trencsényi had the following to say about him:
“Bánkuti understands this world (the Soviet Union and Russia) through and through. And not just because he has bonds there on his mother’s side, but because he has visited the various territories of the USSR at least 50 times. In Moldova they fired at him with a machine gun, in Moscow he experienced poverty first hand, he worked alongside oil miners, he photographed inside prisons, in strip-clubs, at flea–markets, at beauty pag-eants, he captured the aftermath of an earthquake and the epicentre of political unrest. (...)”
In the foreward Tatyjana Tolstaja, a prominent con-temporary Russian writer wrote: “I do not know anything more interesting, more paradoxical, more conflicted than the people of Russia. Russia is a great big land of Bánkuti András: Tüntetés, Moszkva, 1990
zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 22,6 x 29,5 cm
András Bánkuti: Demonstration at Moszkva, 1990 gelatin silver print, 22.6 x 29.5 cm
Bánkuti András: Tüntetés, Moszkva, 1999 zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 18 x 24 cm
András Bánkuti: Demonstration in Moscow, 1999 gelatin silver print, 18 x 24 cm
50BÁNKUTI ANDRÁS 51ANDRÁS BÁNKUTI lunatics. (...) In the Russian universe there is no place
for logic, our doors open with spells of magic instead of keys, staircases are drawn with pencils and the con-figuration of our labyrinths changes without warning.
The best travel guide to Russia today would have to be illustrated by Escher, with travel signs written by Kafka, Beckett and Ionesco.” Ionesco”. (“On drawn staircases”
Népszabadság, 18 June 2007) This description that seems so over dramatic and exaggerated becomes a reality in Bánkuti’s pictures, where we are sometimes terrified, then we laugh, and at other times we... as we please.
His picture entitled Dusk is a classic piece –of Hun-garian photography. The gigantic head of Lenin de-scending from KGB Headquarters is a true Ionescu-like absurd, just like the visit of the survivors to the Gulag and meeting the shadow figures there. Unforgettable and shocking images: the high statue of Lenin, towering over the land as the sole survivor of the earthquake. Or the little boy with the water gun pointed at the face of Gorbachev, his eyes telling us that he would be ready to shoot a real gun, too. There is one more thing I need to mention. From 1979 on, every week he would get into his Bánkuti András: Május elseje, Budapest, 1985, zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 16 x 24 cm
András Bánkuti: 1st May, Budapest, 1985. gelatin silver print, 16 x 24 cm
Bánkuti András: A Magyar Demokrata Fórum I. Országos Gyűlése, Budapest, 1989 zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 24 x 18 cm
András Bánkuti: At the 1st national congress of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), Budapest, 1989 gelatin silver print, 24 x 18 cm
52BÁNKUTI ANDRÁS 53ANDRÁS BÁNKUTIcar and drive down to Győr, to document the life of a bal-let company. He took pictures of the dancers exhausted,
sweaty, euphoric and melancholic, before and after the performance, and sometimes even during.
Nowadays everyone tries to do “behind the scenes”
documentaries, but take a look at the year referred to at the beginning of the sentence above, “Yes we go together since seventynine”. That’s when the Ballet of Győr was founded, and dozens of photographers rushed there, led by Korniss and Féner. “I received a comple-mentary ticket to one of their performances and I went, but with fairly low expectations, thinking this is all just the fashion of the day and is blown out of proportion.
But the experience captivated me. I started approach-ing them, all the while beapproach-ing terrified that I would have nothing new to show, having seen the extensive cover-age they had received. So I started to photograph them during rehearsal, which was twice as difficult, as they were not well lit, and secondly, it was an incredibly
inti-mate world where intruders were not welcome. A per-formance is very difficult to create: it comes about after the correction of many wrong movements and motions, tedious attempts and a lot of heated arguments. And then there is this outsider with a camera and his mouth wide open. It took them quite a while to get used to me, first off I wasn’t even allowed to take a camera. I had to get to know them.
“Then I started photographing them, and after that I showed up with the images, giving them to the dancers as presents. They gradually accepted me as one of their own, and towards the end they let me witness things no other photographer could”. (Ferenc Markovics: Op.
Bánkuti András: Kádár János, 1989 RC nagyítás, 15 x 19,6 cm
András Bánkuti: János Kádár, 1989 RC print, 15 x 19.6 cm
Bánkuti András: Kádár János ravatalához sorbanállók, Budapest, 1989, zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 24 x 16 cm András Bánkuti: Procession of mourners at the catafalque of János Kádár, 1989. gelatin silver print 24 x 16 cm
54BÁNKUTI ANDRÁS 55ANDRÁS BÁNKUTI