Essays and short stories on photographs selected from the Horus Archives

by Zsófia Kergyó

In collaboration with Hungarian cinematographer Sándor Kardos’ vernacular photography collection, the Horus Archives, we invited three everyday imaging enthusiasts who have a way with words to select a photograph from the archive and write us a text in the format of their choice. Here is text two by Zsófia Kergyó, art historian and editor of Artmagazin Online.

Photograph: from the Horus Archives

As I was leafing through the archive’s images in hope of finding something that might have caught my eye had I been a collector (even though I knew I was just a scavenger of the third rank, coming after collector Sándor Kardos, and the website editors), I picked out a photo because it reminded me of a painting. The composition or the moment wasn’t particularly picturesque – I could literally associate it with a certain artwork: Death in Pest by István Mácsai. In both pictures, there is a corpse covered by a white shroud lying on the street with a bag that outlived its owner resting on the stomach of the one and on the thigh of the other body. While the bag is the only visible key to identifying the deceased in the photo, the painter's model is characterized by a pair of shoes, too, sticking out from what looks like wrapping paper.

István Mácsai: Death in Pest, 1978

Mácsai was a keen photographer leaving behind thousands of images, some of which he recomposed and transposed to the canvas. I am only realizing now that it’s this editedness that made the death in the painting seem fake to me. I could not yet articulate back then, though I vaguely felt, that by putting the theme in the center, stripping down the environment, and balancing out every detail, the artist destroyed the surreality of the situation and, as a last generous lie at the catafalque, turned what was already there just fine into something artificial.

A few weeks ago on my way home, I saw three policemen standing by a body bag at a Chinese restaurant a stone's throw from our apartment. I texted about that to my brother, with whom I live, and he replied that he had seen people still trying to revive them when he had left home earlier. The moment the scene got into my field of vision, I averted my gaze – not in horror or death fright but rather in consternation, thinking that it was none of my business. I guess I assumed that dying was a private affair, which could become national news if the person was famous or the way of death was spectacular, but as a short interlude in front of strangers in the street, in broad daylight, it was just unreal. Or I got confused because from the metro station where I get off, I consider the neighborhood my home and not a part of the city (although administration-wise, this zone is still Pest). So somebody died in my home, whom I knew nothing about in their life and did not get to know in their death either; I only knew the approximate place and time of their passing. I pass by that place daily during my commute, and the next day, there was some recoil in my steps.

In the Horus image, the cause of death is clear or at least the tram tracks are a strong hint that it was an accident. Staged by blind chance, everything is masterful in this composition (even if the dead person wasn’t Berlioz, the devil is in the details). On the curb stretching along the centerline of the image lies the corpse on the right, while on the left, three people explain the events to two cops. The man showing his back seems the most upset – it’s not his body language, it’s the officer’s rather soothing than controlling gesture with which he lays his hand on his back that is suggestive. Behind the double tracks, the crowd spectating the scene against the backdrop of the ground floor windows is the background, closed by the photo’s edge from above. They seemed simple onlookers to me at first, but more likely they are the victims of the tram service interruption whose daily routine got derailed so they are doomed to follow the unfolding drama. They constitute both the witnesses and the jury of the scene that their human chain secures and their presence seems to turn into a game harvest after a hunt or an ordeal of the bier. Although nobody looks at the victim from the small group on the hither side of the tracks, their merged shadows connect to the legs of the wrapped cadaver. From the point where the mouth is suspected to be under the shroud, a mysterious white substance flows out, brighter and thicker than any other part of the image (the reality), and then it spills around softly and fades like milk. This paper damage opens up the photo and finishes the story that once started by a click – the soul emanates from the evanescing flesh through this wound, before all eyes, albeit fully unnoticed. If you consider the tracks as the horizon and an axis on which the world was mirrored, the large patch of the empty road, untouched by nothing but the blur of the exhaled air, could be the sky. It happens only in the heightened state of a twisted moment that you can’t see that the yonder side is the one that has become closer to you.

The article was written in Hungarian.
Translation by: Bodóné Hofecker Zsuzsanna

The Horus Archives: Kossuth Prize recipient cinematographer Sándor Kardos’s collection of vernacular photography, is the largest private collection in Hungary in terms of size, comprising close to one million images.

Take a contemplative look at the digitised part of the archive through Horus Archives' webpage here.

Read our interview with Sándor Kardos, founder of the Horus Archives here.