A pusztulás képei. Katasztrófa-fotográfia a 19. század második felében
Pictures of Destruction: Disaster Photography in Hungary in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Summary/Abstract: Natural disasters have always been in the crosshairs of attention, and with the increasing access to press they have become so-called media-born events. From the birth of photography onwards, people endeavoured to capture the impact of natural disasters. The present study examines the earliest examples of disaster photography from Hungary, images of major floods in the 1870s. The photos of two Budapest floods (1875, 1876), as well as of those which devastated Miskolc (1878) and Szeged (1879), allow a comparison of the images created by the new technology with graphic depictions of previous eras. In order to draw a general picture of the perception of floods, the study also focuses on the representation of nature, city and people in photography.The photographs examined retain the previous era’s Classicist or Romantic approach to content and stylistic character, while offering unique and novel ways of disaster representation using the language of photography. On one hand, due to technological limitations, the flood narrative created by photography lacks the traditional dramatic style of earlier graphic representations using depictions of motion and emotions. As opposed to these, photographs communicate the silent drama of floods: similarly to post-battle images, the tragedy is encapsulated in the tension between the subject (the destruction) and the extreme serenity of its depiction. On the other hand, due to the – unintentional – departure from the previous dramatic narrative, floods depicted in photographs lose the primary reason that made them a disaster: the extraordinary. Floods are no longer catastropic – stripped of their extraordinariness, they become everyday phenomena, mere misfortune.

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