4302
Szegedy-Maszák, Zsuzsanna "Miklós Barabás and Photography." Ph.D.
, Eötvös Loránd University, 2019
Keywords/Fields of Study : photography, camera, photographic truth, wet plate process, collodion, daguerreotype, mechanism of the eye, portraiture, punctum, optical trickery, trompe-l’œil, perspective
383
pages, written in Hungarian
, copyright author (Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák)
Abstract: The dissertation examines the Hungarian painter-turned-photographer, Miklós Barabás’s (1810-1898) complex relationship with photography as a trade, as a business, and as an art form. Barabás operated a photographic studio in Pest between 1862 and 1864, but the works and written documents on which the analysis is based are not limited to this brief two-year period. Barabás’s interest in perspective and optics repeatedly finds expression in his oeuvre, and one of the most telling manifestations of this is his photographic endeavours. Anecdotes in his autobiography about the deceptively true-to-life nature of his paintings (those who enter the room were apparently taken aback because his painted portraits were thought to be living people), his early experiments with the panorama (a form of art associated with optical trickery), his lectures on perspective, his ideas on fixed viewing points and trompe-l’œil (in which “art and reality blend together nicely”), his public defence of photography, and his photographic output, despite the differences in technique, size, and genre, all indicate that optical illusion, with which the border between reality and artwork is blurred, played an important role in Barabás’s understanding of the nature, function and meaning of art. In his 1865 lecture How Essential is the Science of Perspective for Painters, read at the National Association of Hungarian Artists, he makes the following contention: “For what other purpose is the frame than to obscure the edges of the image and to make us forget the material existence of the planes of the image.” In his photographic works, this kind of approach is well illustrated by his cartes-de-visite, with their painted backdrops which continue in the foreground with real and artificial flora. Elsewhere, the painted architecture behind the model merges with real three-dimensional elements. A notebook filled with recipes for the wet-collodion process from authors as varied as Charles Russell to Valentin Blanchard and describing all necessary steps, including sensitizing the glass plate and the making of albumen paper, also documents how Barabás continuously experimented with creating his own chemical formula.
Barabás, considered by his contemporaries and posterity to have been a practical and a fairly unimaginative artist, ventured into the world of photography not only for practical, i.e. financial reasons. Behind his business there was also a theoretical interest in the mechanisms and uses of the camera and in the theory of perspective and optics, as he understood the camera as a machine which functioned like the eye. For Barabás both the human eye and the camera serve as a guide for how the painter should create a correct and true depiction.
Department: Doctoral School of Philosophy / Art History Doctoral Programme
, Eötvös Loránd University
Advisor(s): Miklós Peternák CSc
