Modernity and the Backward Glance: Photography and the Uncanny in Hungary 1890-1939

Abstract

This thesis investigates the concept and character of an industrial and urban uncanny in Hungarian photography between the late 1890s and 1939. It seeks to demonstrate the suitability of the photographic medium to convey the spirit and images of a changing pre- and post Habsburg Hungary. It examines the photography of urban and rural industrial sites as emblems of modernity in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hungary within a socio-historical and art-historical framework, drawing from the theoretical work of Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, and contemporary theoretical writing on the modern and architectural uncanny. The work of Hungarian national poets and writers will further underpin the reading of the photographs and examine them in the context of national views of the modern condition in Hungary. This thesis examines the nature and beginnings of urban themed photography in the work of György Klösz around the turn of the century and follows the evolution of modernist photography of the post war rural and urban environment in the work of Rudolf Balogh, Ferenc Háar, Olga Máté and Imre Kinszki in the 1920s and 1930s. It will demonstrate how the social and political changes of the early twentieth century, particularly the geo-political changes to Hungary following World War I, and the ways in which elements of the Freudian uncanny and Walter Benjamin’s concept of a historical uncanny contributed to the development of a distinctively Hungarian photographic modernism.