by Viola Fátyol
Her works are preserved in public museum collections and have also been exhibited, she was subject to ethnographic studies and a TV show on social photography, yet, Mariska Travnik’s name may not ring a bell. While her life’s work has literally been taken off from the attic, it is still gathering dust, even though Mariska’s artistic career is one of the unique and unexpected wonders in the history of Hungarian photography.
I must begin Mariska’s story by clarifying my personal stance, because I feel that this is the only way I can give a credible answer to the question posed in the title. As a visual artist, I think primarily through and of images, my personal life and experiences have a strong presence over my works. The Hungarian countryside is particularly important to me, especially the distinct milieu of Debrecen, my hometown, serving as background in some cases, and as central theme in others, to my series. People and communities living in the countryside have long been fascinating me, which is how I met the folk choir of Vámospércs, with whom we sang together for four years. The choir consists mostly of women over 60, who, in addition to the joy of singing, join the community mainly to cope with the traumatic events, losses of their lives, or with solitude. With the help of this community, the artistic project titled If You Have a Heart, What You Did to Me Hurts You Too took shape and grew, eventually, into a doctoral artwork.
Old woman in a headscarf, sitting – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
In the final, theoretical phase of the work, I strived to elaborate the project’s social-theoretical and cultural-anthropological aspects. Research soon led to the study of the visual representations of the peasantry, especially the relationship women of peasant origin had with photography. At the beginning of the research, I had to briefly clarify the meaning of “peasantry,” the current state of the peasantry, i.e., if it was correct to associate the members of the folk choir with the peasantry. Women in the choir had peasant roots, they had come from peasant families. Therefore, they are heirs to a peasant culture that ceased to exist in its past form during historical events and the violent societal transformations after 1945, but certain elements of which are still carried on by descendants. The peasant heritage can manifest itself in descendants’ use of objects and space, language, community structure, and behavior. Visible traces—objects, courtyards, the tools and presence of agriculture, certain elements of clothing—appear in the If You Have a Heart... series as well. Their appearance is particularly significant to me, as the photos I took were created under the umbrella of contemporary art, and yet they also entail this other, cultural-anthropological layer, where we can explore a peasant past that is no more, but is still with us in fragments.
As I was examining the traces of the peasantry, I felt an increasingly urgent need to find a connection between my own photographs and other, earlier photographic appearances of the peasantry. The study of the historical past and representation of the peasantry led me toward the history of photography, but it proved difficult for me to relate to the depictions of peasants from photography’s first century. Instead of feeling touched, I felt a distance, and that distance bothered me. I started looking for a link of a kind, through which I could personalize, for myself, the historical past of the women of Vámospércs I had photographed. Reviewing the literature, I came across the figure of Mariska Travnik1. A short paragraph about her informed me that Mariska was a peasant girl, she lived in Kecel in the Great Hungarian Plain, where she photographed most of Kecel’s residents in a few years of practice as photographer between 1914 and 1919. The person of Mariska, the figure of a peasant girl taking pictures, absolutely thrilled me. In her work, I’ve finally discovered the cross section where I could make statements on photography and the peasantry at once, and within the peasantry I could think about the conditions and opportunities of peasant women.
Old woman in a dark headscarf – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
The productive meeting of peasantry and photography took place during a peasant golden age, and Mariska’s oeuvre also originated in the final chapter of this period. The photographic medium was in its initial, explosive phase, its enormous buoyancy had a major impact on the transforming, petite-bourgeois peasantry. By the turn of the century, it had become customary for peasants to have, on special occasions, their photo taken, usually by visiting a professional photographer. Photos occupied prominent spots on their walls, and not as documents, but rather as icons. Oftentimes, especially in Reformed areas, photographs were hanged in places once reserved for sacred images2, but in other areas, too, they were installed like home altars in the guest room or, in its absence, in the most representative part of the house. In the last third of the 19th century, it was mostly the land-owning peasants and their families who had their pictures taken. They were at the forefront of the process of modernization, so they desired the pictorial representation of this process the most. Many poor peasants only encountered a camera for the first time due to military service during World War I, or as migrant workers in the US3. With the simplification of photo technology, photography gradually became available to more people, and by the turn of the century, professional photographers were multiplying; having one’s photo taken became easier, faster, and cheaper for all. The number of amateur photographers, who pursued their passion regardless of social class, increased as well.
However, members of the peasantry—golden age or not—continued to have a role only in front of the camera, and for a long time did not get to the other side of the machine. The transformation from photographed to photographer was also related to the stages of modernization. By the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, an economic and cultural climate had developed in which peasants seeking economic and social progress could even choose photography as profession. The social transformation also paved the way for peasants to become less and less hostile toward industrial or, more importantly, intellectual professions. Indeed, one of the defining common denominators of the peasantry was self-identification vis-à-vis superiors and, thus, intellectuals. Although these intellectuals—priests, teachers, notaries—were also villagers, a vast social gap separated them from those who lived off the land4. Photography was not an intellectual profession, but it was more bohemian and suspicious than traditional craft works, so many old customs had to loosen before a member of the peasantry could become a photographer. By the turn of the century, social changes and the level of modernization made this career accessible, and although the emergence of a peasant photographer remained to be a curiosity, it was no longer unprecedented. However, a peasant girl working the camera and serving as a director in the complex act of taking pictures indeed was a unique phenomenon, which is why we should pay attention to Mariska Travnik.
Son and father – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
The population of Kecel is now about 8,000, exactly the same as it was at the turn of the century. Mariska was born in 1899 as the eldest child of a family leading a half-peasant, half-industrial lifestyle. Due to her weak physique, she was spared from demanding agricultural work, so she had the opportunity to learn to take pictures from Árpád Szabó, a Catholic priest serving in Kecel from 1912. Mariska has mastered photography with a folding camera, handling glass negatives, and processing positive images. From 1914 onward, she photographed the residents on Sunday afternoons, capturing, over the years, a full spectrum of local society and all its segments. She photographed leaders, merchants, farmers, the wealthy and the poor, people celebrating and people mourning. During her five-year photographic career, nearly half of the 8,000–10,000 people living in the village faced Mariska’s camera.5 She began taking pictures at the age of 15, and worked intensively until 1919, when she finally stopped photographing and never snapped another picture. The end of Mariska’s photography career can be linked to several events. In 1918, a professional photographer, János Szigethy, moved to the village and opened his studio. The villagers eventually flocked to the new, experienced photographer, and they frequented Mariska less and less.6 Mariska had no business license, in fact she operated illegally, so she slowly stopped taking photos within a year. The conclusion was perhaps more predestined by his own life events than by the appearance of a professional photographer: in 1919, she got married and moved out of the family home, and in 1920, her first child was born. After her wedding, she never held a camera again. The rest of her life was recalled by members of the Travnik family still living in Kecel: Mariska died in 1983, after working as a seamstress for a long time. Her husband was János Farkas, a barber, and they had three daughters, one of whom became a kindergarten teacher and another a teacher. Mariska’s children are no longer alive, some of the grandchildren live abroad, others have passed away.7
The almost two 2,000 glass negatives were moved to the attic of the Travnik house in 1919. Mariska was careful to place the plates in boxes and dated them, but the boxes had to be stacked in towers that, over the decades, fell over, leaving the glasses shattered, moldy, and dusted. They were discovered in 1977 by János Bárth, then director of the Viski Károly Museum in Kalocsa. The entire estate was purchased and transported to the museum, where the collection of 1,740 pieces is preserved to this day. In the past years, the museum has digitized the glass plates and made them available online.
The Relationship Between the World War I and the Travnik Legacy
Mariska’s popularity was also bolstered by the period of World War I and the increased demand for portrait photography. She took numerous pictures of recently drafted young men with ribboned hats, older soldiers, even prisoners of war. Her family photographs often feature only the mother and her children, not the father; most probably these images were made for the heads of the family as they joined the forces or were fighting at the front. Other photos depict men in military clothes at home on leave, surrounded by their families. There are pictures with a wife or mother holding a photograph of her husband or son at the front, thus evoking them. War appears through visual metaphors that we have already seen elsewhere, in other photographers’ works, the familiar visual phenomena strike the viewer again and again nevertheless. The portrait corpus is normality by definition itself, community rules received almost two thousand documentative pictures or, if you like, tutorials: this is how to live, this is how to behave, this is how to dress, and this is how to show yourself in an early-20-century Hungarian village. It is into this normality that war seeps in through subtle visual tropes, and it is precisely because of this inconspicuous guise that its presence is so dramatic. We don’t see it, still we know it’s there, turning life upside down in this Hungarian village as much as in thousands of other places across the world.
Mariska, the Insider
Leafing through the almost 2,000 pictures, I am absorbed by the industrious universe and liveliness of the village. The vividness stems naturally from the photos’ richness in details, their relation to reality, the acceptance of photography as authentic documents, in short, their medial characteristics. Yet, these characteristics do not fully explain the intimacy radiating from Mariska Travnik’s pictures. Mariska’s models followed the photographic conventions of the time, most often posing for the camera in fancy attire and with a festive expression. However, Mariska was no stranger to them, she was an insider, one of them, whom they visited in life’s less prominent moments as well, wearing worn cardigans only. This intimacy is also surprising because the quality of familiarity did not fundamentally alter the purpose of the photographs: the images taken by Mariska still were images of self-representation intended for the public eye. Nevertheless, the legacy contains numerous pictures that somewhat escape the rigidity typical of peasant photography. An elderly woman poses with her puppy on her lap, amused; a young girl wears military clothing, giggling at the joke; a young man in the vegetable garden hugs the waists of two young girls at once. Those smiles are unconcealed, the intimacy and the confidence between photographer and model are—unintentional—parts of the images, behind rigid poses the flexibility of life is exposed.
Amateur and/or Professional Photographer
Most of the time, the intention and competence behind a photo series can be accurately identified, and the same goes for whether the photographer’s skills or attitude changed during their years in practice. These may provide a basis for determining if we should regard the image-maker in question as amateur or professional. In Mariska’s case, however, it is worth pondering this dilemma, since her oeuvre indeed is balanced somewhere on the border between amateur and professional photography.
Mariska’s photographs lay bare her shortcomings in both the technical and the pictorial aspects of photography, at least compared with professional photographers of the time. The tones in her images sometimes fell victim to external lighting conditions and to the fact that the raw materials available then did not tolerate excessive tonal differences. Some areas have either been blown out or remained too dark, lacking detail, occasionally the whole frame’s basic settings are off. Edges are out of focus, the image of the lens is sometimes inaccurate, slightly blurry. Figures now and then fall or slip out of the centered composition, or pile up on the sides. At this point, I must add a personal aspect to the analysis, because even if the above characteristics seem to be, as far as early-20th-century standards of portrait photography are concerned, pictorial shortcomings in Mariska’s pictures, the same features may convert, for today’s viewers, into sources of pictorial fascination. Poor visuality is affecting, catching, it is something I can identify with more, unlike many of those precisely executed photographs that are, from today’s viewpoint, irrelevant studio images.
Private collection of Csaba Kiss, with permission
Shooting always took place on Sundays, and Mariska developed negatives and enlarged paper prints during the week. She set up her darkroom in the pantry, and according to her, “she let in the light needed to illuminate the photo papers through an opening she had cut in the door, by sliding a red glass plate. She soaked the prints in a large wooden tub and dried them in the sun.”8 The equipment she had ordered from Budapest even included backing boards with Art Nouveau patterns, onto the middle of which Mariska carefully glued the finished paper print. This suggests that she tried to present her work in the most aesthetic fashion her means allowed, so that her photos at least had elements—such as the Art Nouveau board, the poses taken, the rudimentary use of props, or coloring—that resembled a studio environment.
Young women – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
It is important to emphasize that most Travnik images are known only as photo negatives. During my research, I eventually reviewed several copies enlarged by Mariska, all of which revealed that Mariska had, during the enlarging process, adjusted the cropping and toning of the images, and even experienced with hand-coloring.9 She applied paint to positive enlargements using a small brush, primarily coloring the clothes, textiles, flowers, and plants in the pictures; in one portrait she also added refined colors to the model’s face. The images are not like the portraits carried out by professional retouchers of the time: the painted details are rough, most of the image remained monochrome, only certain sections received blue, green, or a reddish-pink color. As a result, the overall picture does not even look like a retouched photo, but rather an unfinished coloring page; nevertheless, the bold visual interventions created an intriguing effect. This, as everything else, demonstrates that we are not dealing with a professional or trained artist; Mariska’s sense of visuality, however, is indisputable, and her occasionally unsophisticated solutions made her capable of producing a unique, original, strong visual world.
Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
Based on the exterior qualities of her photo practice, Mariska looks more like amateur than professional. The background to the pictures—in the absence of a studio—was often incidental, she positioned her models in different corners of the Travnik family garden, depending on the weather. Light conditions certainly played a role in choosing locations, and due to the situation with raw material mentioned above, Mariska sought locations with soft light or shade. In spite of the unpredictability, however, she can be considered quite the professional photographer from the point of view of her creative business, taking photos for clients for a specific purpose and getting paid for this service. Moreover, Mariska proved very productive, on Sunday afternoons she had to perform exceptionally concentrated labor to take everyone’s picture who had shown up. In the absence of either a studio or serious assistance, the enormous number of pictures accumulated in the course of five years is, by itself, an outstanding achievement.
Private collection of Csaba Kiss, with permission
Family Album
The photos were almost all taken in the garden of the Travnik house. In the background, you can make out the distinctive patterned house wall painted using a template, the wooden fence in front of the porch, or the oleander planted in a tub. Mariska often hung an embroidered shawl as backdrop for the picture, and occasionally covered the tub with the same shawl. Some models lean on a Thonet chair, best men have ribboned hats on the seat, while girls have bouquets of flowers. Every now and then, someone appears in the background, as if by chance.
Elderly woman in civilian clothes – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
The pictures were taken before the age of complete deterioration, meaning most of the figures wear traditional clothing, but models with modern dresses on are not rare either, and women’s haircuts reflect city trends. The traces of the transition to modern lifestyle, the merger of old and new habits in clothing, furnishing, and customs occupy my attention when browsing Mariska’s pictures, because this intermingling—as suggested in the introduction—is still present in today’s Hungary. My very own family memories, my grandparents’ house, or the homes and gardens of the members of the Vámospércs folk choir, encompass a mixture of traces of the peasant and modern world the same way Mariska’s photos do. This continuity may be one of the reasons why Mariska’s images touch the 21st-century viewer.
Young gypsy woman with a small child in her lap – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
Locations—including wall sections, plank doors, fences, plant details, bushy backdrops and tendrils—are recurring, just as photo props composed in the arrangement are. All these suggest that we are witnesses to an active peasant homestead, with garden tools, tubs, or a cat’s tail getting in the picture. Mariska strived to literally cover up these traces, and at the same time to represent, in the background of her photos, the visual features of peasant life. An even more plausible explanation for protruding objects is, however, that she did not pay attention to them, since she did not “see” them; they were accessories of reality, of normality, which, from a pictorial point of view, stayed invisible to Mariska. And let’s not rule out, of course, that later Mariska may well have removed some of these quasi-alien elements from the prints, when enlarging them.
Young mother dressed in folk costumes with a baby in a swaddling clothes on her arm – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
At the time, it was a common expectation of photography to imitate painting; studio photographers employed a variety of tricks in lighting and camera adjustment to achieve portrait photos somewhat reminiscent of the idealism of painted portraits. Images were softened, blurry and sharp details were arranged carefully, but already in the last third of the 19th century, dramatic, baroque lighting had become fashionable for portrait photography, created with the help of various light shaping tools and booths.10 Even if not everyone exploited these opportunities, by installing painted backdrops they did nevertheless lift figures out of reality, providing portrait photography of the time with a kind of montagelike feel. The montage presence becomes especially apparent in cases when the painted backdrop and the figure in front of it plainly do not match, or when objects from different regions and social classes appear in the background, foreign to what the model represents.11 The captured figures almost levitate above the border between reality and an imaginary world, as the reality created in the studio exists only there, and nowhere else. No wonder having one’s picture taken was considered a notable event: during a shooting, subjects entered a time and space unlike the real, beyond reality. Mariska was not familiar with the various lighting techniques, and due to her unskillfulness in deception, her oeuvre, from this point of view, is close to resembling vernacular photography. In her case, there is no painted backdrop, only the painted wall of the house, with the peasant reality always sticking out from behind the hanging shawl. According to Ernő Kunt, “prior to the spread of vernacular photography, professionals’ studios . . . were peculiar sluices, transitional spaces between the private and public sphere.”12 Although Mariska did not own a studio, her models mostly reproduced postures seen elsewhere, typical of photography studios. They also imitated the use of studio equipment by leaning on chairs, putting a small table with a tablecloth in front of them, or holding flowers. Thus, the passage between the public and private domains occurred in the garden of the Travnik family just as much as in an actual photo studio. Mariska’s pictures were hung in peasant homes, added to home altars or family albums, and shown to each other by villagers. The somewhat dizzy transition between private and public thus seems especially true for Mariska’s images.
Private collection of Csaba Kiss, with permission
Even though constantly adjusting her practice to weather conditions was certainly no simple task, Mariska was active almost all year round. Consequently, the seasons are also reflected in her photos, one after the other. The oleander blooms, villagers holding flowers stand in front of large, sprawling bushes. Then we see bald branches ominously circumscribing models’ heads, as if decay, once done with plants, would also go after people. Finally, patches of snow appear in the yard, at the feet of soldiers in winter uniform. The cyclicality and the recurring locations and objects display permanence, we feel as if we were in a temporal loop where everything always happens in the same place and in the same way. The characters may change, but the stage remains the same. True, the people in the photos are different, we still feel a strong kinship between their figures, owing to identical clothes, hairstyles, and, most importantly, fate. They resemble each other just like members of a big family; some more, others less, but undeniably they belong to the same community and thus share a common heritage. The image’s unsteady composition, the blown-out white collars, and blurred figures all evoke the intimacy of family and vernacular photography. Recurring pictorial elements, the confidence in models’ posture and their gaze with which they look at the photographer, and the unique markers of vernacular photography together arouse the feeling of flipping through a huge family album.
Mariska Travnik and her first child – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
Family albums record the major events of the community, and list its members. Creating them is a long process, when one album is full, they spill over into the next, as long as there is someone left taking care of visual memories. Mariska made such an album about Kecel, compiling Kecel’s faces over five years. It presents the final period of the peasant world in all its bloom, and it is precisely this completeness that enables it to go beyond village borders. It is no longer about Kecel exclusively, but about the Hungarian countryside in general, about the peasantry in Hungary, and about how a vibrant world used to live, which ceased to exist a few decades after the pictures were taken. This irreversibility also contributes to the awe-inspiring force of the images: it is not only people we see in the photos, but a bygone era that, as it is going down, looks back and bids farewell one last time.
Mariska as a Female Photographer, or the Relationship between Hungarian Women and Photography
Ever since its invention, photography attracted creative women as much as men, and, compared to classical genres, it proved to be a generally more democratic field in acknowledging and canonizing female artists. Without getting into details, let us briefly note that this inclusive attitude most probably originated in the fact that photography itself had long fought for equal rights within fine arts; therefore, women with a desire for visual expression, who dared not approach other forms of art, were naturally drawn to photography.
Young woman in a flowery blouse – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
Toward the end of the 19th century, an entire wave of women photographers emerged in the United States and in Western Europe; and in Hungary, too, it gradually became accepted for a woman to choose photography as hobby, or even profession. “In Hungary—becoming a capitalist and modern society—the loosening of the peasant family model, previously seen as inward, accelerated in the decades between 1873 and 1912, and the number of women moving to and finding work in cities increased dramatically. In parallel with the rapid growth of the servant stratum—with a minimum level of education and low literacy—the use of female labor spread and flourished in the service industry, be it care work, hospitality, or administration. Semi-artistic, semi-industrial professions such as photography were mostly pursued by the daughters of rising merchants, industrialists, landowners, or intellectuals. A particularly high percentage among them were assimilated Jewish families.”13 While women’s employment has started, it was limited to fields defined by social and economic boundaries. Peasant girls could get jobs distant from agricultural work if they moved to the city; most of the city jobs accessible to them did not, however, steer them in the direction of photo studios. Primarily women from middle-class families were able to find employment in photo studios like welcoming guests, occasionally undertaking photo assistant tasks or retouching.14 For a long time, regular photography education was not available for women in Hungary, those who could afford it went abroad to study, to Vienna, Germany, or Paris. In the 1910s, there still was no proper school in Hungary, but some studio photographers, spearheaded by József Pécsi, organized photography courses directly for women. Taking stock of these opportunities, one can conclude that while photography training did become available to women in the early 20th century in Hungary, living in Budapest was almost a prerequisite for access to it. The quality of these programs probably varied; József Pécsi’s school had a good reputation, but Gizi Nagy’s course, for instance, was not recommended.15
Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
Other women who mastered photograph usually learned the profession through family connections. The knowledge acquired at home also provided women living in rural cities with a chance to train themselves as professional photographers. Such was Emma Váncza in Miskolc,16 who learned drawing from her father and photography from her brother, or Riza Knébel in Győr,17 who took over her father’s prosperous photography business. Kamilla Asbóth also belongs here,18 who learned the profession from her maternal uncle, Tivadar Glatz, and took over the latter’s renowned photo studio after his death. It was also common for wives to study photography alongside their husbands, so that once the husband passed away, as widows they could continue the praxis. Friendships also tended to have a significant influence on most of the women photographers we are aware of. A girl raised in a bourgeois-intellectual social milieu had a better chance of discovering photography as a profession and hearing about foreign schools and masters, and thus had much more information about her opportunities than Mariska Travnik did in her rural environment.
Young woman dressed in folk costume – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
Neither family nor friendly relationships played a role in Mariska’s encounter with photography. It happened thanks to the fortunate coincidence that Árpád Szabó, the Catholic priest in Kecel, happened to be fond of teaching photography. It soon became clear that Mariska was a hardworking and talented image-maker, and these attributes proved enough to keep her business thriving for five years. However, to improve, she lacked both the social and financial capital necessary to go to a school either abroad or in Budapest, or to join an established photographer as apprentice the very least, and eventually obtain a business license. We do not know whether Mariska had thought of further training, but we certainly know that she was short of social opportunities for additional photography studies; she would have been blocked from educating herself by an informational disadvantage stemming from her peasant origin and rural environment, as well as the expected female roles that she could not ignore even at 15.
Middle-aged man with a hunting rifle, a quiver and a shot hare – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
It should be added that female photographers, regardless of social groups, had to face the aforementioned gendered expectations. “I dare say that a woman who is an academically educated photographer and has devoted her whole life to the matter, is no longer a woman like a woman seeking her purpose only in leading a family, because that woman’s femininity has been lost.” This article on women photographers was published in 1883 in the journal Fényképészeti Lapok (Photographic pages)19. By the early 20th century, male colleagues were much more accepting that women, too, could be photographers—and that they would certainly remain women at the same time. Olga Máté was a well-known and respected photographer in early-20th-century Budapest, Manci Bäck’s studio in Szeged was frequented by a most prominent crowd and the art elite.20 But a closer study of Olga Máté’s life also reinforces that even though she was one of the most talented photographers of her time, and had at her disposal everything that Mariska had lacked—bourgeois family, financial security, social network, international education—her own life events, widowhood, and later a love affair, had the same impact on her artistic career21 as Mariska’s marriage and childbirth had on hers. Olga Máté and Mariska Travnik’s lives may have been worlds apart, but at the end of the day they shared the same career breaks originating in gender roles.
Two groomsmen dressed in dark folk costumes – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
In peasant culture, women’s primary duties were taking care of the family, running the household, keeping the homestead—garden and livestock—in order, and participating in agricultural work. The shift toward modern life often began with learning certain professions or entering the service or industrial sector. Mariska’s mother, in addition to her above tasks, was already sewing for others, and Mariska was about to continue her example. Sewing as a profession organically followed traditional female labor, it could be understood as an extension of sewing home textiles and dresses or repairing clothes, so it was not very far from already existing female roles and activities. Mariska’s straight path to sewing was, however, obstructed by her meeting with the profession of photography. After parting with photography, eventually, she was able to easily resume sewing, where the opportunities of improvement were also available to her; moreover, it was considered a much more comfortable and rule-abiding career choice.
A) Female Photographer, B) Village Photographer, C) Both, D) None
In Mariska’s life, photography may be considered an intense chapter that, however, did not ultimately alter her socially determined path. Therefore, when thinking about Mariska’s place among Hungarian women photographers, we run into walls. She was not the daughter of an urban, intellectual, merchant, aristocrat, or bourgeois family. She was not trained in photography in someone’s studio, she did not consider photography as the desired means of self-expression. Documenting her village was not her passion, she did not take pictures for her own purposes (not to our knowledge, at least). Presumably, she was not aware of the women’s rights movement (unlike Olga Máté in Budapest); she did not run a proper studio (like Piroska Papszt in Szolnok22, or Rilly Weissbach in Mezőkövesd23). The social characteristics and personality traits usually applied to female photographers do not fit Mariska. Based on this, we should conclude that in terms of her artistic profile, she can be classified much more as a semi-amateur village photographer than as a female photographer. During my research, I came across the works of several village photographers working under similar conditions, who photographed villagers, with no studio, mainly in their gardens. Among them, there were pharmacists, doctors, local teachers, and even licensed photographers who, despite having received formal training, maintained similarly rudimentary conditions in their practice as the rest. Compared to Mariska, the commonalities are apparent among the works of these artists, as each of them can be characterized by a subdued visuality, depicting a narrow community from within. The aim or purpose of the photos was also the same: capturing faces, observing significant days, reconnecting soldiers with their loved ones through pictures. What stands out, however, is that all the village photographers but Mariska were members of the village intelligentsia; and, more strikingly, all these fellow photographers were men. Several of them stopped taking pictures around the same time (or a little later) as Mariska did, but ending their practice was not related to personal life events, whether marriage, or the birth of children. Their interest turned elsewhere, or perhaps, with the end of the war, the need for portrait photography declined in the village. Through these comparisons, we can conclude that among village photographers, only Mariska faced role expectations that indirectly prevented her from continuing photography.
Wedding of a young couple in folk costume – Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa, 2023, with permission
The artistic traits typical of women photographers of the time do not really suit Mariska; it is easier to associate her with village photographers. Among village photographers, however, gender still grants her an uncommon status. On the one hand, taking pictures in her case meant crossing a social line, which was not or little true for other village photographers. On the other hand, Mariska has a particularly feminine gaze, or an initial version of it, as she portrayed female figures with exceptional sensitivity. Her pictures of young girls and girlfriends clearly capture the loving, close relationship between the subjects. Depicting women from three generations of the same family, one of her photos demonstrates her skill in portraying groups of women. She made eloquent portraits of elderly women, which went beyond the scope of commissions, revealing something about personality, fate, and life situation. My opinion is that these women’s portraits and group photos are the most beautiful pieces in Mariska’s life work, possibly because she could connect more easily with her female models, and identify with them.
Speculations / A Monument to Youth
As an active photographer, I am especially impressed by the fact that Mariska, following her five-year career, never took a single photograph ever again. (N.B., we can state this with certainty only with regard to her business practice; that she never took family photos either, has not been proven, although I could not find such pictures.) We don’t know how her farewell to photography occurred exactly, especially from an emotional point of view. Did she regret not taking photos anymore, or could she let go of her camera easily? Did she stop on her own, or was it her husband or family pushing her? In the absence of witnesses, we have only assumptions, theories. The local perception of Mariska’s activity is yet another question. On the one hand, they obviously found it acceptable, otherwise half the village would hardly have come to have their pictures taken. On the other hand, looking at portraits of Mariska, we see an attractive girl with delicate features, who could not even stand physical work, possibly making her quite an oddity within the peasant community. Perhaps it was owing to her otherness that Árpád Szabó started teaching Mariska. We also don’t know how the teacher–student relationship between them was perceived and, for example, whether Mariska was less popular among men because of it. I contemplate Mariska’s life and the emotional and psychological aspects of these events for I’m convinced that an artist’s biography, and especially women artists’ lives, cannot be separated from their oeuvre. Mariska married a barber at 20, which seems a decent choice, she did not choose “outside her caste,” marriage may have also constituted social development for her. I saw a picture of the elderly couple; a family photo that depicted them standing in the garden, Mariska with her arms around her husband’s shoulders, looking at each other and laughing. One image is not enough to judge a marriage in its entirety, but the harmony and mutually supportive postures give the impression of a well-functioning relationship. Let us assume, especially for our own spiritual salvation, that Mariska was happily married, had her daughters educated, and that giving up photography did not cause any serious inner tension. It’s quite possible that Mariska did not feel the need to take pictures anymore; we don’t know how much pleasure it used to give her, or if she had in fact regarded it merely as a diligent task. I imagine that Mariska was genuinely interested in photography, in the joy of “creating,” otherwise she would not have produced such a huge number of pictures. But when the time came, she was able, without frustration, to calm her creative energies, or to channel them elsewhere, devoting her time fully to housekeeping, caring for her new family, and later to sewing.
Hoping to get answers to some of my tormenting questions, I contacted János Bárth, who had met Mariska in person, and talked to her a few years before her death, not as a family member, but as a researcher. He wrote to me, “’What was Mariska like?’ you ask me. It’s been a long time since I saw her. She was like the other old women of Kecel. She was not dismissive, rigid, nor scared. She was amiable. She didn’t jabber away. She answered my questions dutifully. I strongly remember her occasionally smiling as she spoke. This was no coincidence, as photography as a subject meant recalling her youth.” The smile that flashes through this account brings peace to me as well. The elderly woman remembers her youthful self and smiles; I take this as a good sign and a perfect conclusion to the story. For young Mariska, photography was work, and maybe passion, too. With the help of photography, she managed to leave the comfort zone determined by the social expectations of the time. She set off toward a different lifestyle, but after her marriage, the final rite of becoming an adult woman, she turned back. Her pictures vividly evoke a bygone era, but this statement goes beyond sociological, ethnographic, or historical interpretations. In an abstract, personal sense, Mariska’s life work also memorializes the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the potential of youth.
Viola Fátyol born in 1983, Debrecen, graduated from the Photography Department of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest where she teaches currently. In her practice relying on project-based conceptual photography, Fátyol intertwines the genres of set and documentary photo, primarily in the form of participative projects. In her works, she addresses current social topics such as gender roles and maternity through the personal experience of protagonists she gets to know in her own as well as in collective working processes. Viola Fátyol lives and works in Budapest. – quoted from the Secondary Archive
Special thanks to the Viski Károly Múzeum Kalocsa and private collector Csaba Kiss. The text is part of Viola Fátyol's DLA research and was translated from the Hungarian original by Miklós Zsámboki.
1 András BÁN, “Magyar fotográfia a XX. században” (Hungarian photography in the 20th century), in Magyarország a XX: században (Hungary in the 20th century), Vol. 3, Szekszárd: Babits Kiadó, 1996–2000, p65.
2 See KUNT, 1995, p29.
3 KUNT, 1995, p31.
4 AMBRUS, 2013, p32.
5 To explore Mariska Travnik’s life events, see János BÁRTH, Keceli üzenet (Message from Kecel), Kalocsa: Viski Karoly Museum Kalocsa, 1990.
6 The Szigethys have operated their business for a long time. After a while, the wife took over the work, and took photographs until the early 1950s under the label “Mrs. János Szigethy’ photographic studio.” See J.V., “Vétetkezés,” Keceli hírek (Kecel news), June 2018, p15.
7 Communication of the living members of the Travnik family.
8 BARTH, 1990, p8.
9 A few colored photos were found in the family archive of fire commissioner János Travnik; the vast collection of amateur local historian Csaba Kiss also contains several colored copies and other positive prints.
10 Károly Gondy invented the booth used in portrait photography, which secured control over the direction and amount of external light from all sides of the model, thus enabling the photographer to create Rembrandt lighting. See Anna Viola SZABÓ, Gond és Egey műintézete Debrencenben (Institute of art of Gond and Egey in Debrecen), Debrecen: Hungarian Museum of Photography and Déri Museum, 2008, pp77–78.
11 See KUNT, 1995, p33.
12 KUNT, 1995, p24.
13 Csilla E. CSORBA, Magyar fotográfusnők 1900 – 1945 (Hungarian women photographers 1900–1945), Budapest: Enciklopédia Kiadó, 2001, p9.
14 E. CSORBA, 2001, p15.
15 E. CSORBA, 2001, p19.
16 Edina SZENTESI, “A miskolci fényképészet legszínesebb egyénisége – Váncza Emma és panorámaképe(i)” (The most colorful personality in photography in Miskolc: Emma Váncza and her panoramic view(s),” in Éva FISLI ed., Fotográfusnők (Women Photographers), conference volume, Budapest: Hungarian Society for the History of Photography, 2020.
17 Krisztina KELBERT, “Festészet és fotográfia szimbiózisa Knebel Riza munkásságában” (Symbiosis of painting and photography in the work of Riza Knebel) Éva FISLI ed., Fotográfusnők (Women Photographers), conference volume, Budapest: Hungarian Society for the History of Photography, 2020.
18 Zoltán FEJŐS, “Ajánlás Asbóth Kamilla emlékére” (Dedication in memory of Kamilla Asbóth), Etnofoto - A magyar Néprajzi Múzeum fotó- és filmblogja (Etnofoto – Photo and film blog of the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography), https://etnofoto.neprajz.hu/index.php/2022/10/21/kepsorok/
19 E. CSORBA, p15.
20 See Béla GÖMÖR, Bäck Manci, az elfeledett szegedi fotográfusnő (Manci Bäck, the forgotten photographer from Szeged), Budapest: GMR Reklámügynökség, 2003.
21 See Csilla E. CSORBA, Máté Olga fotóművész (Olga Máté fine arts photographer), Budapest: Petőfi Literary Museum – Helikon Könyvkiadó, 2006.
22 Ferenc Berta, A fényképészipar 150 éve Szolnokon (150 years of the photographic industry in Szolnok), Szolnok: Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, 2002, pp50–51.
23 Timea Bata, “A ‘német kisasszonyok’ fotói a Néprajzi Múzeumban – A Weissbach nővérek és a matyó viselet” (Photos of the "German misses" in the Museum of Ethnography – The Weissbach sisters and the matyó costume), in Éva FISLI ed, Fotográfusnők (Women Photographers), conference volume, Budapest: Hungarian Society for the History of Photography, 2020.
