by András Zsuppán
To celebrate on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Budapest, the Hungarian National Gallery is hosting a special exhibition of over a hundred photos evoking the capital city during its first golden age, the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The pictures of the city, previously unknown in Hungary, were made by a German postcard manufacturer, and they were discovered by the editors of Fortepan in the collection of Deutsche Fotothek in Dresden. These views are supplemented with extraordinary 3D stereograms of the young metropolis taken by Frigyes Schoch.
Here, we publish a short segment from András Zsuppán's article on Frigyes Schoch's life and work written for the newly published exhibition catalogue.
Marking one of the most important finds in the history of Fortepan, the photographic legacy of Frigyes Schoch was discovered and published in 2012. Schoch’s name was previously largely unfamiliar to the general public, and the engineer and entrepreneur was known at best to those interested in the history of Budapest as the builder of Schoch–Hegedüs Villa, a prominent neoromanticist landmark erected on the side of Gellért Hill (4 Orom Street). Following the publication of his legacy, Frigyes Schoch became widely recognised as a passionate and talented amateur photographer, who took his pictures using the stereophotographic technique that was immensely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Stereophotograph depicting Schoch Frigyes in 1902, source: Fortepan
The essence of stereophotography is to produce photographs that conjure up a three-dimensional effect when viewed through a special stereoscopic device. To make a stereophoto, two exposures are taken of the same object from slightly different angles, similar to the way in which our own two eyes generate spatial vision. Looking at a stereophotograph creates the illusion of being transported right there, to the corner of a street, seeing the image in three dimensions. In the days before moving pictures, when people were generally accustomed to two-dimensional images, viewing such stereophotographs must have been an extraordinary experience; today, the magic of these pictures lies in their power to revivify memories of a bygone world. In Frigyes Schoch’s photos, the world in question is Hungary (and Europe) of the belle époque, the peaceful, prosperous early decades of the twentieth century.
Schoch’s pictures belong to the second wave of stereophotography, which emerged in Europe in the 1890s, when the use of dry plates reduced exposure times and made it easier to create snapshots (1). Stereophotography is as old as photography itself, and even in Hungary, it appeared very early on.
Stereophotograph by Lipót Strelisky from around 1845-1850, image from the collection of Hungarian National Museum's collection, Inventory number: 67.1626
One of the prized treasures in the Historical Photo Department of the Hungarian National Museum is an early stereoscopic daguerreotype made by Lipót Strelisky in the second half of the 1840s (the twin images of the unknown girl are set in a leather case with built-in stereoscopic lens). Among the known Hungarian photographers, György Klösz, Antal Weinwurm, Henrik Szigeti, and Rudolf Balogh all produced spatial-effect photos. A true rarity is the pair of images taken by György Mayer in 1861, recording the corpse of Count László Teleki after his suicide.
Count László Teleki's corpse, György Mayer's photograph, image from the collection of Hungarian National Museum's collection, Inventory number: 1941/32
In the early days of stereophotography, the two images were taken separately, but in the 1890s, when the practice was taken up by Schoch, the dual image could be taken at once using a stereocamera, which was more expensive than a conventional model. Photographers no longer required special expertise to use the new camera, and this technological advance opened up the path for amateurs. To enjoy the pictures, however, it was still necessary to have a stereoscope. In the report written by Márton Kurutz, who discovered the Schoch legacy for Fortepan, it transpires that the family possessed a wooden-cased Gaumont device with peepholes, a popular model at the time. (2) This information derived from Schoch’s grandson, the engineer István Ruszák, long-time custodian of the pictures.
Before his legacy was discovered, all that was known of Frigyes Schoch’s photographic pursuits was from a newspaper article on the spring exhibition in 1902 of the so-called Photo-Club, published in a supplement of Vasárnapi Ujság. Inaugurated by the minister for culture, Gyula Wlassics, on 16 February, the large-scale photographic show was open even to amateur exhibitors. In the stereophotograph section, Frigyes Schoch’s pictures were on display alongside works by such illustrious fellow enthusiasts as Baron Loránd Eötvös, Miklós Konkoly-Thege, and the “globe-trotter” Ferenc Hopp. (3)
A page from the article published in Képes Folyóirat, supplement of Vasárnapi Újság on the “Photo-Club” exhibition in 1902, source: Arcanum
The Schoch legacy survives in the form of glass plates, kept in 37 storage boxes, each with a capacity for twenty plates. The boxes contained a total of 670 photographs, 560 of which were selected for uploading to the Fortepan website. One year after their discovery, the glass plates themselves were placed on deposit in the Historical Photo Department of the Hungarian National Museum. István Ruszák, born in 1929, had passed away in the meantime, and the legacy was donated by his widow and daughter to the museum, which holds the most significant collection of stereophotographs in Hungary. (4)
Biographical details
Although Frigyes Schoch was a successful engineer and entrepreneur in the first decades of the twentieth century, who amassed a considerable fortune building railway lines, remarkably little is known about his life. According to family tradition, he came from a German-speaking Swiss family.
The most certain facts are provided by an entry in the state register of deaths dated 21 March 1924, which informs us that he was 68 years old, that is, born in 1856, christened a Lutheran, and his parents were named János Schoch and Zsuzsanna Botzhauser. (5)
It appears that the family had ties to the northeastern counties of the country. Like his son, János Schoch was a businessman, recorded in a company register in 1879 as a resident of Máramarossziget (Sighetu Marmației, Romania); he was a member of the supervisory board of a railway company in the 1880s (Máramarosi Sóvasút Rt.) and of a soda and chemicals factory in 1889 (in Nagybocskó, now Velykyi Bychkiv, Ukraine), and his activity can be traced until 1892.
Photograph: Schoch Frigyes, source: Fortepan
Among the extant photographs are two taken in the old Lutheran cemetery in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia), one of which shows Schoch’s two sons, Frigyes and József; the younger boy is leaning against a gravestone on which is inscribed a name that could possibly be deciphered as Schoch. The assumption arises that this photo may record a family visit to the graves of relatives, in which case the family might also have had links to Kassa.
Frigyes Schoch’s early life was definitely spent in the northeastern region. In 1884 he married Mária Prugberger, daughter of József Prugberger, director of a mine in Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania); in the newspaper announcement of the wedding, Schoch is referred to as a civil engineer from Munkács (Mukachevo, Ukraine). In 1885 he lived in Nagybánya, and was a member of the Hungarian Carpathian Association, indicating that he enjoyed mountain hiking, an interest that lasted his whole life and is also apparent in his photographs. The couple’s first child, Frigyes Junior, was born in Hukliva (Huklyvyi, Ukraine) in Bereg County on 27 April 1886. (6) They later had two more children, József and Mária (Mariska).
In 1891, when he founded his first company, Frigyes Schoch was still a resident of Máramarossziget. From around 1895 he lived in the capital, always at the same address (55 Váci Street). The Schoch family rented the entire second floor of the neoclassicist apartment building in the centre of Pest.
(...)
Frigyes Schoch, the photographer
Frigyes Schoch’s photos constitute the largest single legacy of Hungarian stereophotographs, and the collection is also outstanding in its quality and variety. (7) Previously unknown in this field, Schoch has been revealed as one of the major urban photographers of the early twentieth century, who produced cohesive series of pictures immortalising some of the most beloved quarters of the rapidly changing and developing city of Budapest: the environs of the bridgehead of the (old) Elisabeth Bridge, both in the final moment before the demolition of the old Inner City, and after the monumental construction of Ferenciek Square; Gellért Hill, Buda Castle, and the banks of the Danube.
Frigyes Schoch's stereophotograph depicting the Elisabeth Bridge under construction in Budapest, photograph taken on the Gellért Hill, source: Fortepan
Frigyes Schoch's stereophotograph depicting Ferenciek tere, 1902, source: Fortepan
Among the sets of photos he took in the countryside, the ones produced on two family holidays to the Adriatic (around 1900 and in 1908) are outstanding, showing the distinctive sights, harbours and boats of Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia), Abbázia (Opatija, Croatia), Pola (Pula, Croatia) and Plitvice Lakes; also noteworthy are his pictures of the Tatra mountains and of Siófok on Lake Balaton. A separate set of pictures among those depicting bourgeois family life in the period contains solo and group portraits taken in Bérc Street and on the suspended walkways in the courtyard of the apartment block on Váci Street.
Frigyes Schoch's stereophotograph taken in Abbázia, in 1908, source: Fortepan
Frigyes Schoch's stereophotograph taken on the suspended walkways in the courtyard of the apartment block on Váci Street, 1903, source: Fortepan
(1) Balog and Felvinczi 2006, 7.
(2) Kurutz 2012a.
(3) “A «Photo-Club» kiállítása” [The “Photo-Club” exhibition], Képes Folyóirat (supplement of Vasárnapi Ujság) 31 (1902): 770.
(4) Kurutz 2013.
(5) Állami anyakönyvek [State register of births, marriages and deaths], Budapest, 6th district, Deaths (Oct.) 1923–1928 (Jan.), entry no. 320.
(6) Állami anyakönyvek, Budapest, 6th district, Marriages (Jul.) 1919–1924 (Sept.), entry no. 109.
(7) Kurutz 2012b.
The full length article is published in the book accompanying the exhibition. The book can be purchased via this link, the price is 5800 HUF (approximately 15 EUR).
The Budapest. The First Golden Age exhibition is hosted by the Hungarian National Gallery – the exhibition is on view until February 18, 2024. More information on the exhibition via this link.
We thank the author, the curators of the exhibition and the Hungarian National Gallery for the permission to publish this excerpt. The full length article will be available on the Eidolon Journal after the exhibition's closing – until then we encourage our readers to visit the exhibition and purchase the catalogue!
