Károly Chochol, the chronicler of socialist Budapest, evokes the capital in never-before-seen pictures
“I don’t dispute that the sight of loving couples holding each other’s arms among the rows of artists selling their genre paintings on the bank of the Sejna is an attractive and idyllic picture, but for me, our quay was much more exciting. Bridge cranes three stories high ran on rails to unload the barges. In Óbuda, the Gázgyár, and in Pest, the mills lined the shore. But it was at least as important a place for community life and relaxation as it was for work. Fishermen lined up sitting on the stones, often waiting for a catch with their own equipment, perhaps in the past even smaller and larger fishing boats caught the fish on the Budapest stretch. And, of course, people who simply wanted to relax, basked in the first spring sunlight, students who read and were preparing for exams also strolled here. They came here from further afield to joke around or just dip their feet in the cooling water. In the 1950s, it was the one who was taken there by the taste, for example, to examine a small or large wash”, – photographer Károly Chochol opened his book entitled A Budapest quay, published this year, with a personal reminiscence.
Apart from the opening lines, only the photo captions in the volume can tell about the additional motivations of Chochol, who took the shots, but from the photographer’s other pictures, which are open in the Archives of the Capital City of Budapest and can be visited until next May at an exhibition Gabriella Csiffáry, the curator who conducted the life journey interview with Chocholl, also gives a guided tour to those who register in advance, where you can get a glimpse into the lives of the photojournalists of the Kádár era.
The socialist everyday life in Hungary that appears in Chochol pictures – as István Kenyeres, the director general of the BFL, said at the opening of the exhibition in November – primarily commemorates the everyday life of the little people in Soroksár, Angyalföld, Pesterzsébet and Óbuda who lived in the 1960s and 1970s: his grandson’s village, his teacher’s street was Verklis , to the worker circling in the sea of mud, to the man in a Swiss hat drinking a glass in the pub, to the woman hanging out clothes in front of her cave apartment, to the emergency housing condemned to redevelopment, behind which the emblematic buildings of the next era, the panel towers, are already rising.
Although the snapshots of the Rákosi era and the decades of the Kádár era show unimaginable misery here and there, according to Mayor Gergely Karácsony, who opened the exhibition, in the photos we can not only see the past, but also look for the future. This does not sound very encouraging at first, but the city manager explained that he understood this to mean that the city was used as a living space until the 1970s and 1980s, and only then did it begin to be treated as an area, the main function of which is to to get from one point to another.
According to the mayor, this way of thinking has led to the fact that life has disappeared from the streets of Budapest, which is preserved in the collective memory of the capital’s citizens, and the enthusiasm for 20th-century photos can also be partly explained by the fact that people are looking for what they have lost in recent decades: public spaces. , conversational people, retailers, ordinary citizens.
“I missed a lot of pictures”
The curator of the exhibition, chief archivist Gabriella Csiffáry, conducted a life interview with the 87-year-old photographer who was awarded the MÚOSZ Golden Feather Award and the Rudolf Balogh Award during his career, but who was unable to attend the November opening due to a long-term, serious illness. From the cut version of their conversations, which can be heard in the archive, it is known that although Chochol, born in 1935 and trained as an optician by family tradition, traveled around the city with his camera from the age of 13-14, an exhibition of his pictures was organized by the age of 15, but he still made the majority of his recordings for the table drawer.
This is quite surprising in light of the fact that Chochol was a photojournalist for the Hungarian Television news station from 1960 to 1994, for more than three decades. However, according to his own account, he defended himself against the history-falsifying expectations of the Kádár era by saying that “I only record the facts (…). I did my job with distance, because I was paid to do it, and I didn’t do more than the obligatory expectation for a breath (…). I didn’t want to look like the sociopaths who opposed the normal. I wasn’t a fighter, but I wasn’t a compromiser either.”
In the desk drawer, for example, were the negatives of his 1956 recordings, because although, according to his own admission, “I was famous for not going down to the street corner to buy a newspaper without a camera”, in the days of the revolution it was dangerous to take photographs, but those who did, were very careful that no one find your pictures. There were those who even had sleepless nights from the negatives hidden in the attic, and subsequently destroyed the recorded recordings. Chochol, as he says, was forced to prove several times that he did not take a single photo during the days of the revolution, even though he took photos in every corner of the city. It’s true, he wasn’t satisfied with the image afterwards, because “the vest tailored for me was too big. I left out a lot of pictures because I couldn’t compose them in a way that I could tell it was an artist made picture. The need for a documentary should have been much greater in me than the artistic expectation. I missed a lot of pictures.”
Among the recordings that met his own expectations, one of Chochol’s favorites is the one he took on Szent István körút, where “someone tied a puppy with an asparagus around its neck in front of the Vígszínház, and in the rain a passer-by bent down to the puppy whining there . and tried to ease the puppy’s pain with a few soothing words. This is an important image for me.”
Although the album he selected is about the wharf, and his favorite picture was taken in the neighborhood of the city center, Chochol claims that during his career he was most connected to Angelland, “because my father had a shipbuilding factory in Ipoly Street (…), but then this workshop the Great Depression made it impossible and (…) he moved the workshop to Margitsziget. Then we moved to what was then Ferenc József, now Belgrade wharf. Our apartment looked out onto Gellért Hill, the Danube bank, I could see the ships there, the Danube, that was also very interesting, but I missed the romance of this environment. When I looked back at Angyalföld, I found the small houses on the ground floor, multi-apartment houses, it was somehow more romantic and touched me more than the exterior image of an apartment building.”
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