Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory

A Farewell to Private Photography

11 I began researching private photography in 1982. Let me list a few features of the intellectual and spiritual climate in Hungary during the late Kádár era that shaped this research. The concepts of forced modernization—that is, the centrally dictated pace of modernization for the underdeveloped economy— were becoming deflated by the 1980s: the fellow-feeling of West European communist parties had faded away, local strategies of consumption as a form of opposition were emerging. In the economy of shortage, consumption was ideologically connected to capitalism, that is, to the enemy, thus the desire or even modest practice of consumption was interpreted as a form of political resistance to the socialist regime. Art no longer authenticated the power of the state sufficiently, as a result of the Helsinki process. While in the 190s some elements of communist idealism could be clearly felt behind the state’s efforts in arts and education, by the 190s, a shadow of suspicion came to linger on all autonomous initiatives and endeavors, be they amateur theater, university A Farewell to Private Photography András Bán The pictures illustrating the present essay are photos taken between 190 and 190, collected in the course of conducting different family interviews and preserved in the Archive of Private Photos and Films. 114 A FAREWELL TO PRIVATE PHOTOGRAPHY gallery, or folk dance house. In this spiritual and intellectual climate, sophisticated techniques of “reading between the lines” and the networks of alternative initiatives appeared. The Central European practices of making contacts in the field of arts froze due to the political events in Czechoslovakia and Poland. But due primarily to the activity of the Soros Foundation, as well as to new international connections initiated by art institutions, orientation towards the West became more intensive.1 I was motivated by two factors at the start of my research. One was that I followed the changes of the late modernist changes of art in that period with a kind of skepticism; and the other was that during a long journey to America, I had discovered the discipline of visual anthropology. This mixture of skepticism and revelation flared up in the form of the highly intense research that took place in the Művelődéskutató Intézet (Research Institute of Culture). During the research process, nearly 100,000 photographs and about 100 life interviews were archived; dialogue began with experts of related sciences who were very important for us; publications appeared; and intense international correspondence began. In the beginning, my research partner, filmmaker and visual artist Péter Forgács, was more interested in the visual characteristics of the private image, while my aim was to explore the modes of using images.2 A FAREWELL TO PRIVATE PHOTOGRAPHY 115 The Horus Archives and its founder, Sándor Kardos, followed by film directors András Jeles and Gábor Bódy, certainly played a significant part in that. So too did the change of the conceptualist approach to art, as well as the emergence of the new world of photography in the 1980s—primarily in the photos of Lenke Szilágyi. But in addition to all these, our research had a part (a part that we did not yet understand then but practiced anyway) that was closely related to the forced modernization described above, that took place during the Kádár era. Being the heir of the Stalinist regime, the governing regime had feelings of guilt. The past meant danger, because it was uncontrollable. The family legendry, the telling of personal stories, was also surrounded by suspicion. The discursive space of public history could be changed somewhat by narratives of the “workers ’ movement,” but private history resisted such changes. By collecting family stories of nameless people and archiving their personal photos, we unknowingly attempted alternative historiography and social research. At the same time, in our research we strove to define new frames of thinking rather than attempting meticulous classification and archiving. Later, when the archive was lost without a trace, this methodological mistake turned out to be a benefit. Our research of private photography became less intense in the second half of the 1980s, as Forgács’s attention focused on making the Privát Magyarország (Private Hungary) film series,4 while I made considerable efforts 11 A FAREWELL TO PRIVATE PHOTOGRAPHY to publish the photos we had collected—unfortunately with little...