CANCELLED: The “Érdekes Ujság Battlefield Photo Album” and the Experience of Hungarian Photography during World War I

This project focuses on a photography collection, the ‘Érdekes Ujság Battlefield Photo Album’ published and sold by the Hungarian illustrated newspaper, Az Érdekes Ujság (AEU) during the First World War. The editors of AEU held a series of contests, which encouraged soldiers to send in pictures from the front. The best entries were published in the paper and the winners received cash prizes. The pictures submitted by the soldiers and published in AEU tended to recapitulate old established genres of pre-war, nineteenth century photography. The aesthetics that dominated the AEU contest were rooted in the nineteenth century, even when confronting total war in the twentieth century.

Several factors account for the aesthetic continuity between pre-war and wartime images in the AEU photo contest. First, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the limits in photography are not set by technology, but by what society designates as the photographable. Hungarian audiences expected wartime images to reflect established aesthetic categories like the Picturesque. Second, throughout the nineteenth century, and up to World War One, photography remained a highly technical pursuit. Commercial photographers and accomplished amateurs had to master the same skills and technical knowledge. Ultimately they also choose the same aesthetic vocabulary. Finally, the jury that evaluated the contestants was composed of the editor, the publisher as well as several noted photographers and an art school professor. For professional reasons the jury members had similar ideas about what constituted a ‘pretty picture.’ This poster analyzes how Hungarian war photographers used two nineteenth century aesthetic categories, the Picturesque and the Genre picture, to make sense of their experience of total war.