I would most like to say only: why should we talk so much about Kerekes, when everyone knows everything about him – and some know even more than this; we should rather just look at his pictures, speak with him and with each other, and take advantage of the fact that we can be in the company of one of the best photographers of Hungary. And certainly, I also have enough courage in me to do so – but after all, I will not, because it’s good to tell a story.
I am talking about a photographer who, in many as-pects, represents a unique standard on the palette of Hungarian photography. His career and personal events are also of interest, but we will come to that later. First of all, so that you will continue reading what follows, please take this brief summary, which naturally is ad-equately subjective: He is the one, who in his personal-ity, and in his creations, links the most modern twenty-first century photographic procedures with the activity of the alchemists, famous and infamous of the Middle Ages. Among the contemporary Hungarian photogra-phers, perhaps he is the only one in whom is material-ised the expectation, not from even so long ago – let’s say, until the turn of the 20th century – of every master photographer, that with their knowledge of a dozen pro-cedures among their means, they should always choose that most suited to their message, and to the task to be solved. Who use everything, from the camera obscura, through the Polaroid, up to the latest generation digital image recording devices, with a self-evident natural-ness, that is suited to image recording; who, with great artistic thinking and in a creative way, employ every photographic procedure and technique, which they deem suitable for the mystical-magical visualisation of the knowledge of nature and interest evoking bygone eras. In accordance with this, Kerekes – as opposed to
the photographers of the current age, who have become slaves to technology – creates with a rather high degree of freedom. And this is only beneficial to his pictures.
Two more things: the first is an incredible perfection-ism – his practically compulsive quality, that always, under all circumstances, he will only give what is fully the best he can give out of his hands. There are no sto -ries, no exoneration, no spiel, that this will also suffice, or you know how difficult the circumstances are... No.
With Kerekes, the artwork can only be flawless, both in terms of conception and execution. And then the second thing: almost never does he give anything from his own hands: he wants to oversee the entire creative proc-ess. From the birth of the idea to until its delivery, from preparing the shot to the experimentation of the techni-cal procedure suited to it, all the way through the often multi-step realisation of the artwork, up to its mounting and framing, everything made by Kerekes. And one last thing: he is capable of changing. But not just a bit, but the things defining him, blood-deep. He became known and renowned for his early, blacked toned, heavy photo-graphs, of heavily oppressive effect. Others would have sat on this for the rest of their lives. There are exam-ples. But they are not named Kerekes. Then he became a leading photojournalist for the leading illustrated press organs of the era. Under dozens of magazine cov-ers, it was printed, Photo: Gábor Kerekes. Others would have kept on as reporters until earning their pension.
Not him. He quit his well-paying positions. He remained silent for a long time. His latest photos touch upon such fundamental subjects as birth, existence, death, pass-ing. In the Kerekes-type of particular artistic-scientific pictures, elements of the microcosm and macrocosm appear in the same scale: the sky, stars, planets, micro-scopic enlargement of his own body fluids, sweat and
250KEREKES GÁBOR 251GÁBOR KEREKES He received a number of awards from the quarterly
Fotóművészet (Art Photography) competitions, and then in 1977 he was accepted into the Studio of Young Pho-tographers (FFS) that was just forming. This was the most noteworthy group of the era, the only real work-shop for young photographers who wanted to stir the waters of Hungarian photography. For three years he was a member of the board of directors, and then from 1986 for four years he was the artistic director of the Studio. Here he made his most important photos, with-in the framework of the competitions. Another fifteen years must have passed before I also took part in the myth-producing around the personage of Kerekes, and this is what I wrote then in an article about him: “You know, my boy, once long ago, maybe thirty years ago, a plucky, black-haired waiter huffily slammed the door on ten other young photographers, just pouncing. He was deeply offended. They didn’t accept the pictures that he had to submit to the Studio of Young Photographers in return for the support he had received. At the time,
get-ting in a huff was not a difficult, trying task. Yes, but this youth, in his affrontedness, did not get drunk, did not go out to drown his sorrows with Toldi in the reeds, but he began to work. He started the whole thing from the beginning. Within days, he remade his task of several months, and also fixed himself for the long term. Not a week had gone by, and he opened the door that had just been nicked, and he deposited his new material be-fore his similarly young and similarly talented fellows.
A number of them remained with their jaws dropping...
Why? What did this boy – drink-server skilled worker at the Eastern Budapest Catering Company – show them?
Stone-hard, moody, balladist photographs reduced to black-and-white, and toneless. Thumbing his nose at so blood, body parts preserved in spirits, and old objects
carrying past knowledge. He does something uncom-mon in photography: he philosophises, carrying out on-tological examinations with his pictures, while he cre-ates aesthetically moulded artworks, radiating a strict compositional order, and providing a feast for the eyes.
In any case, with the passing of time, he has become a real professional. He lives from his photography, and he would like to be known and recognised in wider cir-cles worldwide, and he does everything necessary for this. Sometimes even instead of others. Even at his age, he continuously studies and experiments, observes himself critically, builds up both his works and connec-tions, and pays attention to the smallest details... What else does he need? Of course, talent. But that he has, I can say in all certainty.
He was born in Oberhart in Germany on 2 August 1945, as the child of refugee Hungarian parents, hauled off to the West. The family escaped from the war, and in the same year, they moved back to Hungary. Kerekes began to see the world in images while attending Kölc-sey High School, drawing and painting – but he didn’t yet take a camera in hand. He unsuccessfully applied to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, and thus, between 1964-73 at first he studied catering, then worked as a waiter. The experiences and insight into character he obtained here left their mark on him up till today. After serving innumerable steins of beer, mixed drinks and spritzers, he enrolled in the Dési Huber István Photog-raphers’ Vocational School, and completed the course.
Here he was officially pronounced a photographer, receiving a stamped paper confirming it. With this in hand, he was made assistant reporter at the Budapest Photographers’ Co-operative, then photographer at the Siderurgical Research Institute for five full years. And one would believe, hallelujah, here it is, what you wished for: you wanted to be a photographer, and now you are…
but no, he was Kerekes. In 1979, he had enough of this activity, and he once again became a waiter, or officially a server, at the No. 1011 Újhegy Self-Service Restaurant.
If I remember well, this was in Kőbánya, and when I went to visit my grandmother, he always warned me, if I got there, I should go to the other side. And things happened with Kerekes the waiter. A colleague at the Museum of Catering is researching it, and I can promise that it won’t be without a lesson. And then, like so many oth-ers among those prominent on the Hungarian cultural scene, neither did he escape the attention of the secret service agents who wanted to involve everything during
the Socialist era preceding the political changes. He was a member of the Communist party since 1981, and the union man at the restaurant. It was about this time that he was roped in as an agent of the 3/3 department. He did what they obliged him to, then they forgot about him, and he also tried to forget everything. This only came to light in 2005, and instantly – in my judgement, with a greater emphasis than was necessary, and always con-trolled by concrete political aims, in intensified, embel-lished forms, by way of affront, humiliation or jealousy, whether legitimate or not – was given strong publicity in the press, and on internet forums. Drawing his own conclusions, Kerekes took a step back from public ap-pearances, but his creativity, in the wake of the affront and frustration springing from this, only grew.
But it would be more practical for us to get back to photography, which Kerekes encountered first in 1970.
If I count well, he was already twenty-five? Indeed. He first took part in a group exhibition in Szentendre with his photos in 1973. In the wake of his earlier fine arts studies, the many paged-through photo albums, and the dissected images, he suddenly found his own individual mode of expression, and he came up with the technique suited to it. “I was a waiter then, Gábor Kerekes recounts in his room interspersed with photos, and I was given a camera with a telephoto lens as a wedding gift by a very good regular customer. It was four years ago – I was 27.
Alongside waitering on the Balaton, in my free time in the afternoons, I began to stroll with my camera – this is how it started…. I left my profession from which I made my living, and I entered a photographers’ co-operative as an aid for 1400., then I was further trained as a labo -ratory technician. Already my first rolls of film were not family amateur pictures; I set out in my first steps with aesthetic desires, and yet, those pictures that I thought were good at first, today I sweep aside: they are clichés.
It was great experience: I learned technique! Then an even greater step: I learned to use the technique. Which means more or less to me: not to exploit the technique at any cost. To back off from the extreme limits achieved, and not to allow the techniques acquired to determine my pictures, but to serve my aims with the technique. If necessary, in such a way that I turn the technique against technique: if I have already achieved that the negative is pin-sharp and as rich in tone as possible, then with complicated technical interventions I “corrupt” the en-largement – and I only use from the results what I have a need for”. (Zsolt Csalog: “Bemutatás: Kerekes Gábor”
[Introduction], in: Mozgó Világ, 1977/2, pp. 11–12)
Kerekes Gábor: Tank, 1989
zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 16,8 x 22,1 cm Gábor Kerekes: Tank, 1989
gelatin silver print, 16.8 x 22.1 cm
252KEREKES GÁBOR 253GÁBOR KEREKES many photographic conventions, he photographed the
city on printing material almost completely unsuited to photography”. (Károly Kincses: “Made in Kerekes”. Nép-szabadság, 11 January 2001) I didn’t make up the story;
I only rounded off a bit of what I heard when I was still a student in Szombathely, from my mentor, my friend, my landlord, photographer Laci Dallos. Neither did he stray far from reality, because he sat inside when the slammed door reverberated. Thus, we might say that the story seems to be credible. These pictures that we are referring to, do not document, “do not record almost anything; the everyday is boring and uniform, and the people are just there – if they are there at all. In the situ -ations caught by Kerekes, it is as if time had stood still, but not in the way that we try to imagine, after the hack-neyed metaphor, that time freezes: motion stiffens; but in such a way that what had only stood until now began to blur, or to set off towards vanishing. Already in the early 1970s, we had to regard Kerekes as the pioneer of Hungarian photography… Kerekes’s most important
photograph of the time, 1 May, made with a camera ob-scura, simply “dematerialises” and disappears into the parading crowd”. (László Beke: Kerekes Gábor helyszínei és mindennapjai. A Hetvenes-nyolcvanas [GK’s Locations and the Everyday: The Seventies and Eighties], preface to the album. Hungarian Museum of Photography, Kecs-kemét, 2003)
Kerekes had hit upon a formal language that ex-pressed precisely an atmosphere, with which the Bu-dapest pictures that he had previously photographed for almost a decade were lifted out of their concreteness, so that they no longer signified the Kelenföld Flax Works, which I saw from my window every day since my child-hood, nor the ferris wheel of the Vidámpark (Amuse-Kerekes Gábor: Kariatida, 1978
zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 18 x 25 cm Gábor Kerekes: Caryatid, 1978 gelatin silver print, 18 x 25 cm
ment Park), or the scenic railway, but photographs that are rather extremely contrasty, with few tones, and consequently are powerful, sombre, and visually ex-tremely moulded, which spoke to the fact that among these quite dishevelled decors, we didn’t live very hap-pily, then in the seventies-eighties. Kerekes created a form and a language that are today self-evidently used by authors young and not so young, who perhaps never saw these photos.
He himself speaks thus about the beginning of his photographic career: “I began to photograph quite late, at the age of twenty-five, and for twelve years I photo-graphed Budapest quite systematically; four-five hours a day, I knocked about, roaming the streets, my camera bag on my shoulder, hitching here and there... In 1983, I only made two or three shots, and then for ten years, I didn’t photograph at all. As is the custom to say: I had arrived to a creative crisis. I felt I had become fatigued, and I would only be able to repeat myself, and there was no point in this. What I wanted, I had already reached
the end of. In any case, of my production of twelve years, I bequeathed those thirty-five pictures to the Museum of Photography in Kecskemét, which I am proud of still today”. Some photographic writers refer to him with the attribute “everyday classic”. I think this is good for him so long as he doesn’t believe it, and remains what he is:
a photographer of great knowledge, at nearly seventy, still a researcher, a seeker, very curious about certain things in the world, one of the figures of Hungarian pho-tography capable of export, the Master.
The second phase of his photographic career is counted from 1986, when he worked as a photojournal-ist contributor for Képes 7, Képes Európa, Európa, Kisk-egyed, and Népszabadság TV Magazin. His press photos Kerekes Gábor: Szökőkút oroszlánnal, 1978
zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 18,3 x 26,3 cm Gábor Kerekes: Fountain with Lion, 1978 gelatin silver print, 18.3 x 26.3 cm
254KEREKES GÁBOR 255GÁBOR KEREKES made then were included in the Press Photo annual
ex-hibition series, where he won several significant awards for three years. In 1988 he received the Hungarian As-sociation of Journalists (MÚOSZ) Award of Excellence, in 1990 a Balázs Béla award, and later he also earned the title Artist of Merit. Kerekes, although many believe that he was one of the best Hungarian photojournalists, myself included, from one day to the other gave up press photography. His accomplishments in it were high, of-ten too high above the expectations of the editors at the time, and still – or perhaps exactly for that reason – he was not satisfied by it. For years then, he didn’t pho-tograph anything at all. Instead, he read an enormous amount of literature on art, technology, mythology, al-chemy, astrology, and everything else that interested him and somehow could be brought into relation with photography.
When he began again to photograph after the long pause, he radically broke with his style up till then, and turned toward other subjects, and he also tackled them
in an entirely different way. For instance, he made for himself a metre-long camera obscura, and a large-for-mat camera, using 30x40cm negatives, and with these, he recorded the Moon, falling stars, human body parts prepared for medical purposes, and old apparatus and objects related to physics, chemistry and medicine. He made duplicate negatives and contacts, in the inter-est of better drawing. He processed the large-format negatives with archaic procedures offered by historical techniques (e.g., cyanotype, salt paper, albumin, aristo paper, but also cast collodion glass negatives, if neces-sary). Today Kerekes cultivates entirely strange things in photography: he cogitates, philosophises, and carries out ontological examinations by way of his pictures. It
is only a stretch of the hand for immortality and magic, for those who look at his photos at least with as much attention and desire for understanding, as much as it is indispensable for the operation, as viewer, to sub-merge from the superficial process of looking at im-ages to the deeper layers of comprehension. But do not be frightened – it is not obligatory! These images also function in themselves, as beautiful pictures depicting unusual objects. But in the same way that a glass of watered-down wine to be thrown back differs from a connoisseur’s wine-tasting, this type of Kerekes-photo also demands absorption, a renewed mobilisation of our existing knowledge, and the individual rethinking of the messages mediated by the images. “In Kerekes’s attitude, present simultaneously are the gesture of the photographer who sees and creates in the complex way of the past century, and that of the most modern media artist, who concurrently uses the mode of expression and tools of art photography, and perpetually questions them. In him, are inseparably together the veneration
of photography touching upon mastery, of the charac-ter of techné, the autonomous artistic self-expression concealed within it, and the intellectual, scientific ap-proach touching upon the existential questions given by the means”. This was written by Klára Szarka in the daily Magyar Hírlap on the occasion of an exhibition ar-ranged in 2000.
“With my works made over the past ten years, I am
“With my works made over the past ten years, I am