Gabor Kerekes, the Alchemist

Graphis, May/Jun 2002 by Rexer, Lyle

Gabor Kerekes, the Alchemist. A decade after the fall of Communism, Gabor Kerekes is reviving the great tradition of Hungarian photography-the tradition of Brassai, Kertesz and Moholy-Nagy. But does he also know the secrets of the universe? - By Lyle Rexer

If photography is a form of alchemy, Gabor Kerekes is its Paracelsus. His goal is not to capture the world in a frame but to transmute the unseen into the seen. Little known outside Eastern Europe, this philosopher with a camera is the most influential photographer contemporary Hungary has produced. In a career that has spanned the fall of Communism and Hungary's reentry into the mainstream of artistic culture, Kerekes, now 56, has put his stamp on every form of photography, from journalism to alternative processes. In his current work, he is using techniques born of 19th century science to express a vision of the universe at the beginning of the 21st.

When I met Kerekes, on his first visit to the United States, I had seen only a handful of his images at Sarah Morthland Gallery. They were quiet disturbances that continued to cause tremors the more I thought about them: a hand; a comet; antique scientific equipment that seemed to hum with a sinister energy; a dark orb nestled in a hole torn open in a sheet of metal. The roots of these photographs were clearly Surrealist. They were images of the inexplicable. Yet they possessed a more palpable certainty than Man Ray's or Duchamp's photos. Kerekes seemed to have found that place in the soul where archetypes take historical form-the factory of dreams.

Among his Hungarian contemporaries, the German-born Kerekes looks like a professor in a collection of aesthetes and revolutionaries. Regardless of their various styles, they all defer to him and freely acknowledge his influence. Kerekes has won the first prize of the Hungarian Press Show three times and been awarded the prestigious Bela Balasz prize. More important, as photographer and writer Sandor SzilAgyi has pointed out, he has led "fatherless" Hungarian photography out of the shadows after decades of artistic repression and isolation.

In the early part of the 20th century, photography was virtually

Hungary's national art form. There were camera clubs everywhere, the first of them founded by Count Eszterhazy himself. It is impossible to speak of modern photography without reciting a Hungarian litany: Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Robert Capa. In a long diaspora, all of them left their native country, as did others including Martin Munkacsi and later Sylvia Plachy. The authoritarian rule of the 1940s, followed by postwar Communism, suspended the great tradition of Hungarians making photos, publishing them and writing about them. Of those who stayed, many were just as talented as the expatriates but found themselves isolated and consigned to obscurity. "Official" photography was little more than soft-focus tourist photography that functioned as propaganda. For those artists willing to make their own images in private, everything had to be reinvented, from actual techniques to aesthetic ideals.

This is the world Kerekes confronted in the late '70s when he began to make photographs. Looking at his reportage of the late '70s and '80s, it is hard to believe that he could have achieved such prominence. His images-all of which he later destroyed-graced more than 50 magazine cover images. His spare, pessimistic style was hardly suited to five-year plans and the myth of the glorious future. It unites a rigorous formal sense with an existential vision of social reality. Kerekes depicts factories isolated in empty, snowy landscapes. His buildings are sliced by dense, deep shadows and in one striking case, he reduces an edifice to a monolithic black form. Unlike contemporary German photographers Berndt and Hilla Becher or their precursor Albert Renger-Patzsch, Kerekes expresses no "joy before the object" in Renger-Patzsch's famous phrase, rather a foreboding and estrangement, as if the world were a language of antiquated signs that could no longer be deciphered. Everywhere Kerekes looked in the 1970s and 1980s, he seemed to find the traces of Hungary's departed economic, military and spiritual authority. A war monument is a tank aimed toward the sky, going nowhere. Likewise his people seem deposited in this landscape, in vaguely decaying cafes, neither defiant nor resigned, unadorned, expecting little perhaps but a long winter. In such pictures, Kerekes gave permission to other Hungarian photographers, including most notably Imre Benko, to use their photographic intelligence to tell complicated truths that don't fit political or journalistic formulas.

And then he stopped. In the mid '80s, Kerekes gave up taking pictures for nearly eight years. In 1993, he renounced photojournalism for good and destroyed more than 5,000 negatives. He saved only 35 negatives, images made for his own purposes and donated them to the Hungarian Museum of Photography. His reasons were as uncompromising as his work. "I no longer found in reality what I wished to photograph," he remarked. "And I did not want to be bound by what others ordered in terms of an image. Just to work for money was too easy."