Hungary [antikvár]

Confession of a LyricistHungary is a small country, but as her friends abroad often say, she is a great power in three fields: music,mathematics and lyric poetry. Looking at the delightful colours in Károly Gink's photographs of Hungary'sregions and towns, I think that perhaps it is not too pretentious for a native of the country to add a fourth one:photographic art. Photography has the advantage of music and mathematics, it can be understood withoutrecourse to language, while we can still only give our word of honour as to the greatness and universal appealof Hungarian lyric poetry, our greatest pride; although in the last ten years it has found such translatorsas Guillevic, Martinov, Hermlin, Fühmann, Ted Hughes and Edwin Morgan.A Hungarian man of letters cannot speak of photographs without mentioning his prides and sorrows in the samebreath. I do so this time because of the inspiration of Károly Gink's photographs. They evoke in one's mindthe beauty of the Hungarian towns and countryside. At the same time they affect one as deeply as only poetry can.Gink has joined the line of our fourth "great power" in which stand the artists Brassai, Capa, Aladár Székely,Márton Munkácsi, Károly Escher and Kata Kálmán. Among them there are dramatists of the camera like Capa,epic poets like Székely, satirists, of course, like Brassai, and lyricistswhich in some sense they all are, becausethey are Hungarian. Photographic lyricism is the specific artistic idiom of Károly Gink, and in this volume hischaracteristic style comes forth in his use of soft, rich colours.If art can be defined as reality seen by and filtered through a given temperament, the definition nowherebecomes so valid as in photographic art. A photographer's reality is the most natural, full-blooded, palpable,the least transposed, the most direct reality. This becomes evident in this volume. However, just becausethe presence of reality is so palpable, a lyric temperament is necessary for the alchemy of art to take place.I do not have to prove that this has taken place in Károly Gink's pictures; his eighty photographs speak forthemselves. This volume is the confession of a lyricist of how and what he sees in Hungary and what he bringsto it from his own self. He brings his sensitivity, which is much more delicate than that of the emulsionon his film.I believe Gink has taken stock of what he liked best in his country, what he has liked for a long time, perhapssince his childhood. He takes a good look at it from every direction. Then he sets the aperture of his eyes,consults his memories for timing, measures distance against his emotions, and only then does he pick up hiscamera. In this way, filtered, as it were, through his temperament, he notices the two gentle beasts in a side-wallof the Romanesque church of Ják. In this way he goes back to the one-time Roman province, Pannónia, tothe village of Tác, once called Gorsium, and pays homage to the memory of the ancestors in his photographof a stele depicting father and son.Just as Gink's camera rediscovers his native land, so we discover, looking at his pictures, the structure of his book.Here too he remains faithful to poetry, for poetry is the strictest genre. Gink's volume has both an innerand an outer structure. The latter can more easily be discovered. He starts out from Budapest (where else couldhe have started from?), turns towards the north, along the Danube, to Szentendre, Visegrád, Esztergom, and fromthere to the western gate of the country, Fertőd, the one-time Eszterháza, and the Castle of Kőszeg.On the road of centuries and the route of today's tourists, he then arrives in Sopron, and makes a detour to Ják.