On Tuesday 27th FD (Foundation Degree) Year 1 Photography got up at 5 in the morning to board a coach at 6 to visit our beautiful capital city to visit the National Portrait Gallery and the Academy of Photography for the Eyewitness Exhibition of 20th Century Hungarian Photography.
I have been to the National Portrait Gallery before and apart from a Photographic Portrait of Johnny Vegas recreating Demi Moore's August 1991 Vanity Fair naked pregnancy pose - but obviously with his "food baby" instead of actual Pregnancy and was the only real portrait, in my view of the artwork on exhibition of Comedians' Portraits from 1940 to today, that really captured the grotesque, full on, controversial humour of Johnny Vegas - they say a picture is worth a 1000 words, but it didn't take long of studying photography to realise that this was not true at all, in fact its normally the other way around - a picture requires several thousand words to describe it - but in THIS case, Karl J. Kaul really has captured everything with no need for explanation.
Moving on to the real main core of this blog - I am going to write about Rudolf Balogh. Funnily enough this isn't a person that I am supposed to be writing about and I can't wait to be told by my lectures not to be focusing on such an iconic master of the art of Photography. But it does not matter, because I get to write about him now. Balogh (1879-1944), the Hungarian born photojournalist trained in the art of Photography in Vienna and then joining the Vasárnap Újság (Sunday Post) in Vienna. After Exhibiting for several years and achieving photographic excellence, he became a phenomenal war photographer through the First World War on the Eastern Front before returning to his homeland and Budapest where he returned to Photojournalism. He was an extremely influential man and photographer to many of the Artists that I HAVE been asked to research and analyse like André Kertész and Martin Munkácsi. More than anything else Balogh recognised that until the beginning of the 20th Century, Hungarian Photography had always been strongly influenced by European Practices and he wrote "We need photographs to communicate our particularities and our national character".
Of all the photos on exhibition there it was odd, after spending so long looking through books and internet pages of the photos of these great masters it was in one sense like seeing famous celebrities in the flesh, but on the other hand - seeing all of these brilliant photos, right there as soon as I walked through the door was a set of 3 photos that captured me more than all the rest of the exhibition put together. In this order from left to right were:-
I have been to the National Portrait Gallery before and apart from a Photographic Portrait of Johnny Vegas recreating Demi Moore's August 1991 Vanity Fair naked pregnancy pose - but obviously with his "food baby" instead of actual Pregnancy and was the only real portrait, in my view of the artwork on exhibition of Comedians' Portraits from 1940 to today, that really captured the grotesque, full on, controversial humour of Johnny Vegas - they say a picture is worth a 1000 words, but it didn't take long of studying photography to realise that this was not true at all, in fact its normally the other way around - a picture requires several thousand words to describe it - but in THIS case, Karl J. Kaul really has captured everything with no need for explanation.
Demi Moore's Pregnancy Pose by Annie Leibovitz
Johnny Vegas by Karl J. Kaul
Moving on to the real main core of this blog - I am going to write about Rudolf Balogh. Funnily enough this isn't a person that I am supposed to be writing about and I can't wait to be told by my lectures not to be focusing on such an iconic master of the art of Photography. But it does not matter, because I get to write about him now. Balogh (1879-1944), the Hungarian born photojournalist trained in the art of Photography in Vienna and then joining the Vasárnap Újság (Sunday Post) in Vienna. After Exhibiting for several years and achieving photographic excellence, he became a phenomenal war photographer through the First World War on the Eastern Front before returning to his homeland and Budapest where he returned to Photojournalism. He was an extremely influential man and photographer to many of the Artists that I HAVE been asked to research and analyse like André Kertész and Martin Munkácsi. More than anything else Balogh recognised that until the beginning of the 20th Century, Hungarian Photography had always been strongly influenced by European Practices and he wrote "We need photographs to communicate our particularities and our national character".
Of all the photos on exhibition there it was odd, after spending so long looking through books and internet pages of the photos of these great masters it was in one sense like seeing famous celebrities in the flesh, but on the other hand - seeing all of these brilliant photos, right there as soon as I walked through the door was a set of 3 photos that captured me more than all the rest of the exhibition put together. In this order from left to right were:-
Six Cattle
Stud
Shepard with his Dogs
Of all of these it was the first - Six Cattle - that really caught my full attention. As a visual learner, I am used to looking before I read and so when I looked upon the photo I couldn't help but think that there was something beautiful and yet unreal, foreign, supernatural about the photo. The way the sky is lit and the detail that is retained in the cows. I figured out that the description of the photo would probably tell me but I wanted to work it out for myself, I wanted to have that moment of realisation for myself, without having to be told. It came to me after about 5 minutes of observation and that is that the top part of the photo and the bottom are actually from different negatives ( http://www.ilfordphoto.com/aboutus/page.asp?n=124 ). Once I had worked this out I read the description and sure enough, I was right. This is word for word the description:
Rudolf Balogh
Six Cattle
Combined 2 negatives - a technique developed in the 19th Century as a way to deal with different exposure times required to capture a bright sky and the details of a landscape adaquently.
- Hungarian Museum of Photography, Kecskemét 77.150
This got me thinking about the idea of combing photos and then of combining photos that I have taken last year and recently in to something that really captures what we see. The idea of this fascinated me and for the rest of the tour around the gallery I could not stop thinking about this and the idea of combing certain photographs. The idea of a person facing a window and superimposing a separate image, that could be of anything, in the frame of the window. I aim to make this my main goal for the next week, hopefully my lecturers will agree with my efforts. Watch this space...
