The fact that we have not one but two Endre Friedmanns goes to show how rich Hungarian photography is. They could have even met. They would have had the oppor-tunity to shake hands in 1948 when Robert Capa was in Budapest. Capa was born Endre Friedmann in 1913 and died in 1954. The other Endre Friedmann, the one who is the subject of this article, was born in 1934 and is still alive and well. The day before yesterday we had home-brewed beer in a restaurant by the Danube. Not for the last time, either. We will be back. He got a frequent cus-tomer discount from the owner of the restaurant, who used to be Friedmann’s assistant. Anyway, Friedmann’s life is full of such incredible stories. Back to the begin-ning. The potential encounter in 1948 never happened, and it wasn’t until 1963 that Endre Friedmann found out he shares his name with his world-famous predecessor.
Needless to say, Robert Capa never heard about his col-league living in Hungary. Their paths could have crossed several times – even apart from the occasion that I have already mentioned. Both of them were photojournalists.
They were both working in Hungary and all around the world. Although separated by nearly twenty years, they were both in Vietnam, though only one of them returned.
“I only found out that we had the same name in 1963,
when I won the Grand Prize at the Photokina in Cologne.
There was a big celebration, although I don’t know how big, since I couldn’t go in person. As was the custom in those days, my boss at Hungary’s MTI news agency went to pick up my prize. I was working at the time the cer-emony was held. As I was walking down the office cor-ridor, my ex-boss Pál Schiffer hollered to me through his door, which he always kept open. ‘Friedmann, old boy, people are hailing you as the new Robert Capa’. That’s when it dawned on me. Before that, I wasn’t even aware of the fact that we had the same name”. (Interview with Károly Kincses, 2008) From that time on, his colleagues called him ‘Capa Junior’.
He could have gone abroad. Paris Match and Stern wanted to employ him, but he wouldn’t go. This is prob-ably why he didn’t have a brighter international career.
He had all that it takes. He was talented. He had a great eye, the stamina and the right attitude to work. And he still does. The fact that talented people born, raised and educated in Hungary don’t get the opportunity to fulfil their potential at home was definitely true in his case as well. This was the case then, and it still is. “A bloke from France approached me and made an offer that struck me as very profitable. He said I should move to France,
104FRIEDMANN ENDRE 105ENDRE FRIEDMANN his superiors at the news agency. “MTI sent an official
response to the publisher. The British guy made an offer, and they came up with a counter offer. The publisher’s answer was that since Friedmann was the author, they would like to negotiate with him personally. The thing is, you know, I couldn’t even fully grasp all this back then.
To be honest, I didn’t really give a shit. I would probably go about it differently today, but the circumstances were quite different then. In the end, of course, nothing came of it. I can’t remember the actual offer, but to us in Hun-gary it was an enormous amount of money. I would have been paid several times the Hungarian press fees and for a hundred photos too”. (KK 2008, Op.cit.)
Friedmann is one of the few who has remained just a photojournalist throughout his entire life and never ven-tured into anything else. Wherever he went, whatever he saw, he always had the same mentality when it came to
looking through the viewfinder and pressing the expo-sure button. As long as we are at it, I think the prize for the most loyal photojournalist should also go to him. He started working for MTI (which in those days was called the Hungarian State Photo Agency) when he was seven-teen, and he has been employed there for the past sixty odd years. He is a pensioner now and of course works less and less. Over the years, he went from being an as-sistant to being a senior staff member. He never became a boss, which I think is better – for him and for the others too. Sixty years, though, is still sixty years. Is there anyone where he would cover my living expenses for two years.
After this period he would pay me a certain percentage of the money he makes selling my photos. To this day, I consider this a really fine offer. I nevertheless didn’t hesitate to say no. To understand this, you need to be fa-miliar with the situation back then. If someone left Hun-gary during the 60s, they were very unlikely to ever come back. Such people were considered dissidents – along with all the consequences. Had I left, I couldn’t have come home for years. I didn’t want to leave my elderly
father and mother behind, so I stayed, and I’ve never re-gretted it. I was able to give my parents everything, and this is a great feeling. I also believed that I was a re-ally good photographer and that I could prove this even in Hungary”. (KK 2008, Ibid.) The international audience did start to get to know Friedmann’s photographs. Apart from his Love series, which I will come back to in greater detail, he sent several of his works to international exhi-bitions. Most of these bore stamps of approval from the Association of Hungarian Photographers and the Cen-tral Bank of Hungary on their back. This is how things worked in Hungary in those days. He won several of the photo competitions he entered and was starting to make a name for himself. With a little bit of effort and exper-tise, his career could have taken off abroad as well. It is another issue altogether that neither the Hungarian
News Agency (MTI) nor the Hungarian state nor Hun-gary’s cultural policy makers were interested in making this happen. ‘They would not let him go, even when he was invited to go internationally. Why aspire to interna-tional fame when he can take pictures here in Hungary?
So he kept taking photographs until he became the real Friedmann. He has taken countless photos during his fif-ty years as a photographer, and he is still doing it today.
Friedmann is an affable photographer. He lives among people and doesn’t stand out from the crowd. He enjoys
everyday events, the fleeting humour of the moment and the absurdities of life. His work has always been down to earth. He photographs everyday life: the first No Honk-ing Day, days with record low temperatures, midsum-mer scorchers, an unnamed ticket inspector and a park ranger”. (Mihály Gera: Endre Friedmann: People, at the book launch, Mai Manó, 2006) It was around this time when a British publisher approached him about putting together a book of his photos. This, of course, was no mean feat back then. He had to ask for the approval of Friedmann Endre: Pesti galambok, Budapest, 1957
zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 30 x 45 cm
Endre Friedmann: Pigeons of pest, Budapest, 1957.
gelatin silver print, 30 x 45 cm
Friedmann Endre: Az udvaron, 1957 zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 45 x 30 cm Endre Friedmann: In the Yard,, 1957 gelatin silver print, 45 x 30 cm
106FRIEDMANN ENDRE 107ENDRE FRIEDMANN to follow him? Hundreds of thousands of negatives and
prints at the news agency bear his code name: Fri. This is a remarkable number, especially if you consider that some of his photos were labelled dangerous and were destroyed by his superiors, who were guided by vari-ous political and ideological considerations. How, I ask, could these photos have been dangerous? These photos included a documentary series taken at a small country school, the coverage of the invasion of to Czechoslovakia by Hungarian troops in 1968, the censored photos of a military exercise and pictures of an audition for a film. I guess we can all agree that world peace rested on such matters, and so did ideological superiority. Forget about it. Sadly, we never learnt from those times, and nothing has really changed since then, so we shouldn’t waste any more time on this.
Friedmann became a lab assistant at Office No. 4 of the Hungarian State Photo Agency in the Budapest city centre. He picked up whatever there is to be known about the profession from the leading masters of Hungarian photography at the time. These included Rudolf Járai, Ti-bor Csörgeő, Gyula Zacsek, Béla Hollenzer, Dezső Szik-lai, Zoltán Seidner, Marian Reismann, Klára Langer and Ernő Vadas. These are names that used to be known by all Hungarians back then. “Those were the days, but they
were miserable ones too. I was cleaning or fetching peo-ples’ lunches, and then I began to trim photographs. I had to trim the dried copies. When my eight hours were up, I followed the famous photojournalists on their as-signments and helped carry their gear. I wasn’t allowed to take photos. I could only assist the photographers. I’ve learnt from all of them”. (KK 2008, Ibid.) Friedmann had barely started working for MTI when he was enlisted as the photojournalist for the military newspapers serving the division stationed at Gyöngyös and later Kecskemét.
You can imagine that it wasn’t exactly a stroll through the park being a member of the Hungarian People’s Army between 1954 and 1956. He does have a lot of fabu-lous stories from this period. I hope I can get him to tell me all of them one day. After he was discharged and left the army newspaper, it was only natural for him to be-come the military correspondent for MTI. It was his job to cover military exercises and any events involving the armed forces. Very few reliable and ideologically sound Friedmann Endre: Húzd rá, 1965, zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 45 x 30 cm
Endre Friedmann: Play another, 1965. gelatin silver print, 45 x 30 cm
Friedmann Endre: Püspökavatás, 1969 zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 30 x 45 cm
Endre Friedmann: Bishop Consecration, 1969 gelatin silver print, 30 x 45 cm
108FRIEDMANN ENDRE 109ENDRE FRIEDMANN photographers were available since at least one third of
Hungary’s photojournalists had left the country in 1956.
Some of them left empty-handed, and some were able to take their negatives, while some took other people’s negatives. So Friedmann was needed everywhere in those days. I am amazed at how many photos he took, for instance, of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, and how the entire history of the Ballet Institute can be re-constructed on the basis of his pictures alone. These are remarkably strong genre photos, depicting every-day stories and characters. Friedmann covered count-less public events like the Liberation Day celebrations (4 April 1945), the October Revolution celebrations (7 No-vember), the May Day processions, the World Festival of Youth and Students, events involving the Young Pioneers, the Young Communist League or the Young Guard. He was also present when the Soviet troops left the country in 1991. These events represent many faces of the period that lasted between the mid-1950s and 1989, and what Hungarians call Socialism - for want of a more fitting term. In 1973, Friedmann spent four months in Vietnam.
The next year, he won the World Press Photo gold medal for hisseries, From Captivity to Freedom, which he made in Bien Hoa, Vietnam. He paid a huge price for these
pho-tographs: he contracted amoebiasis while working on it.
His doctors fought for his life for a year and a half. After his recovery, his employers at the news agency wanted to put him on a disability pension, but he refused. In-stead, he tried to hide his problems, and every day for seven years he went for physiotherapy first thing in the morning. This is what Friedmann is like. “If I remember correctly, Hungarian troops were sent to Vietnam in 1973 to oversee the enforcement of the peace agreement.
The war was still going on when I arrived there with the first Hungarian unit. The peacekeeping committee had Indonesian, Polish, Canadian and Hungarian members.
Many of them were journalists. I was the only profession-al photographer. I spent four and a hprofession-alf months there.
Right after we landed at the Saigon Airport, we met a bunch of Americans, who were laughing their heads off when they saw me wearing a military uniform. We knew each other from before in other parts of the world. They
too were photojournalists. My wearing a military uniform was therefore a source of immense merriment for them.
There were many times when I wasn’t allowed to work.
There were also times when I was fined or attacked in the street, or when my camera was confiscated for hav-ing taken photos the Vietnamese officials considered of-fensive. I even managed to get to a place where no pho-tographer had ever been before me. It was Devil’s Island, where North Vietnamese POWs were held in bunkers.
The people there were kept under inhuman conditions.
Naturally, their captors were not happy about all of this being photographed. This place was considered strictly off limits. I managed to get to the island on a C130 mil-itary transport plane. They didn’t want to let me on at first, but after pulling a few strings I finally managed to board. The South Vietnamese commander wouldn’t let me to do anything. But then I found out his child was on the island, so I started to play and make friends with the kid. I managed to get closer and closer. Then I started to take photos. I shot a roll of film of the kid and father.
After that I moved on to photograph the POWs. The pic-tures spoke louder than words. The prisoners were put on huge C130 Hercules transport planes. There were so
many of them there was only room for them to squat in the plane. I went up to them and started taking photos.
Suddenly I felt a machine gun pressed to my abdomen.
Hands up, they shouted. They were real close to shoot-ing me too, but I was fortunate enough to be saved by the commander, the father of the little kid. There was an-other time after that when they got angry with me again.
It was when the pilot who flew me to the island found out where I was from. He came to me asking whether I was Hungarian, and went on about how he was shot down over Lake Balaton in Hungary by a Spitfire. It turned out he was an old Chinese pilot, who had also fought in the Second World War. I was afraid he was going to retaliate for his bad memories of Hungary, but, strangely enough, he seemed to be happy to have met a Hungarian. I even managed to get him to open the tail of the plane where the tanks and the lorries enter. I was loaded down with
Friedmann Endre: Pesti tróger, Budapest, 1958 zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 30 x 45 cm
Endre Friedmann: Transport worker, Budapest, 1958 gelatin silver print, 30 x 45 cm
Friedmann Endre: Tejszállítás, 1958 zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 30 x 45 cm Endre Friedmann: Milk Delivers, 1958 gelatin silver print, 30 x 45 cm
110FRIEDMANN ENDRE 111ENDRE FRIEDMANN
Friedmann Endre: A Váci utcán, Bufdapest, 1963, zselatinos ezüst nagyítás, 45 x 30 cm Endre Friedmann: On Váci Street, Budapest, 1963. gelatin silver print, 45 x 30 cm my gear. He flew me over the camp, so I could take aerial
photos while hanging down from the plane. Everone to-tally freaked out over it of course. A few days later, three of us went to Saigon. I was arrested, and my camera was confiscated. I once photographed a prisoner exchange, and all the while a fire fight was going on. I still have the photos of this. At the time, I was with South Vietnam-ese troops, who knew a place where the river could be crossed. I said I would cross over with them, but then I noticed a soldier carrying his wounded mate on his back.
I left the group and ran back to take a photo. By the time I was finished, the others had left in a boat without me. I was cursing at them, but it soon turned out I was lucky.
The boat they were in –the one I almost took – was blown up. I was left to take photos of them being brought back to the camp in pieces. I stayed alive. They were dead, in pieces and covered by a flag. I could go on and on. Imag-ine, for instance, what it was like to be in Vietnam with a name like Endre Friedmann. When I won the World Press Photo Award in 1974, I was identified with Capa.
There was talk of how there is another bloke who has the same name and works in a similar genre. I wouldn’t like to compare myself to him, Westeners have already done that”. (Sandor Bacskai: “Interview with Endre Friedmann”, in: Fotóriporter, 1999/1-2, pp. 30-39). I bet Friedmann has at least fifty more stories from Vietnam, and each one is better than the next. He’s a marvellous storyteller.
As a photographer, Friedmann has an eye for the lyri-cal and the grotesque, but he can be detached and objec-tive at the same time. He has an incredible sense of just being around with his camera in places where others are going about their daily lives, doing this and that, hanging out, running around or stuck in traffic, whether at eleven in the morning or three in the afternoon, or at any other time of day. Once he is there with his camera in hand, he transforms himself from good old jovial Endre Fried-mann the jokester into a focused hunter armed with a camera and fully immersed in the situation. When he is like this, you can talk to him or ask him something, but it’s as if he wasn’t even there. He is there, though. He is fully present in the given situation, but as a photog-rapher. Once he is finished and has put his camera and innumerable lenses back into his bag, he again becomes his old self, always ready for a conversation and a good time. I’ve seen him do this on many occasions. I am not making it up. “The problem with contemporary docu-mentary photography, in my opinion, is that the photog-rapher remains an outsider. To me, there’s something
missing in this. The point for me is not simply to have something ugly or maybe even repugnant in a photo. I want my pictures to radiate the quality of being human.
When in 1963 I was working on a photo report about a dirt poor county school, I got to like those little people in their destitution, their innocence and their own lit-tle world. When I saw the warmth on the face of one of
When in 1963 I was working on a photo report about a dirt poor county school, I got to like those little people in their destitution, their innocence and their own lit-tle world. When I saw the warmth on the face of one of