Pál Rosti (1830–1874) Traveller and Photographer
Pál Rosti (1830–1874) Traveller and Photographer

Summary/Abstract: No history of 20th-century photography would be complete without mentioning photographers László Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, Martin Munkacsi, Robert Capa, Brassaï, George Kepes or Lucien Hervé, who left Hungary to become famous abroad. However, the history of photography in Hungary goes back much further, to the late 1830s. Louis Daguerre’s invention was announced on January 7th, 1839 at the French Academy; less than a month later the Pest journal Hasznos Mulatságok (Useful Diversions) printed news of this. In the spring of 1839, Daguerre presented pictures he himself had made to the Emperor Ferdinand V, Metternich and to Count Antal Apponyi, the Austrian minister in Paris. In 1840 a book on photography was published in Hungarian, and there was an exhibition organized by the Pesti Mûegylet (Art Society of Pest) displaying three daguerreotypes that had presumably been brought from Paris. To our current knowledge, the first photographs in Hungary were also taken in 1840. In that August, Antal Vállas, a professor at the university in Pest, presented two daguerreotypes that he had taken from a window of the chamber in which the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was sitting: they show the Danube bank and the Royal Castle across the river in Buda. The painter Jakab Marastoni (born Giacomo Maraston in Venice), the first professional photographer active in Hungary, opened his studio in January 1841. To date, more than 40 daguerreotypers are known to have been active in Hungary between 1840 and 1850, and the number of daguerreotypes they produced is estimated at several thousand.

• Details
• Contents