An emblematic picture of the Hungarian 1956 Revolution: Photojournalism during the Hungarian Revolution

Abstract

By presenting various interpretations of an emblematic photograph of the 1956 Revolution, this contribution discusses the relationship of photography, history, and photojournalism during the Cold War. It focuses on a Paris-Match picture that was used as the opening picture of a report about the Budapest uprising. The authors explore different interpretations of the picture and the different political and cultural uses that were made of it in the West and in communist Hungary after 1956. The second major issue concerns the relationship between that same picture and Western photojournalism during the Cold War. The Paris-Match picture was not only a specifically Western product, the product of primarily French, Italian and American photojournalism, but it also became a memorable icon of Western photojournalism, as well as an important moment in the history of the press.

Notes

¹For the first and until now the only historical analysis of the relationship between photographs and history related to the 1956 Revolution see Clément (1998). There also exists one important study in Hungarian that partly deals with how the communist police archived and used a large number of photographs on 1956; see Sümegi (2004, pp. 309 – 318).

²The exact number of Western reporters covering the revolution is unknown. In his memoir, Guy Turbet-Delof, director of the French Institute in 1956, recalls 41 reporters registered at the French legation between the 5 and 9 November; see Turbet-Delof (1996) (quoted in Clément 1998, p. 28).

³See the recollections of the journalist Paul Mathias, who accompanied Pedrazzini to Budapest in Paris-Match, 29 October 1966.

⁴On the legend-making see Clément (1998, pp. 31 – 33).

⁵Interview with Russ Melcher in May 2002 by Phil Casoar.

⁶Thanks to the position of his mother at UNESCO in Paris, Melcher who was doing his military service in West Germany during the Korean War, decided to stay in France. Gradually he integrated himself into French photography: between 1950 and the beginning of the 1960s, he covered, as a freelancer, the earthquake at Agadir, Brigitte Bardot going to Saint Tropez with her new fiancé, the meetings of Robert Poujade, the French populist politician, the confrontations between Walloons and Flemish in Belgium as well as the visit of Khrushchev to the USA and that of Eisenhower to Nehru's India (interview with Russ Melcher in May 2002 by Phil Casoar).

⁷This and later quotations from Melcher are from the interview with Russ Melcher in May 2002 by Phil Casoar.

⁸Leica ‘was easily portable, used long strips of gelatin roll film, which permitted repeated exposure, and had interchangeable lenses’ (Davenport 2000, pp. 152 – 153).

⁹This photo was published by the Italian magazine Epoca (on 11 November 1956). Since several members of this fighting group appearing on the Beretty picture participated in the siege of the Communist Party headquarters in Köztársaság tér—they also appear on other pictures taken during the siege, for instance by John Sadovy who reported for Life—there is some chance that the couple of the Paris-Match picture was also there.

¹⁰This is one of the differing approaches that may be used to analyse photographs and each of them reflects its own particular respects and priorities; see Wells (2000, p. 35).

¹¹See Bourdieu (1965) quoted by Clément (1998, p. 82).

¹²She had conserved in her personal archives the pictures taken of her.

¹³These photos come from the personal archives of Mario De Biasi and have never been developed until now.

¹⁴In his first commentary for Paris-Match on the revolution, on 3 November 1956, Raymond Cartier used a typically anti-communist and pro-capitalist vocabulary which corresponded to what one can consider as the main line of the magazine too (although the pro-capitalist attitude did not prevent Paris-Match from being critical towards American policy): ‘The communists have never legally conquered Hungary … This noble Western and Christian nation has never given its support to totalitarianism and barbarism’ (quoted in Clément, 1998, p. 76). In a special issue devoted to the events in Hungary, the French communist weekly Regards was ironical about the fact that Paris-Match, owned by the big French industrial tycoon Jean Prouvost, had taken the side of the insurgents. However Paris-Match, as well as Life, remained silent about the role of the workers' councils (see Clément 1998, p. 77), although this would become an important subject in the late 1960s and 1970s, discovered in the West after Hannah Arendt's ideas on the Hungarian Revolution were published. But it is worth noticing that the American news magazine Time, in its 24 December 1956 issue, printed a full article about the workers' councils and their resistance against the Kádár regime.

¹⁵The Paris-Match issue bearing Melcher's picture is dated 10 November. In the next issue, dated 17 November, on the cover and inside, the faces of the insurgents were covered with black masks.

¹⁶Primarily those pictures became incriminating evidence that depicted men and women belonging to the insurgent groups with weapons in their hands: it is known from the trial of Mária Wittner and associates that the photograph taken of her and Katalin Havrilla Sticker was accepted as conclusive proof, although they insisted that they had taken the guns only to pose for the photograph. See the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (hereafter HAHSS), ‘Trial of Mária Wittner and Associates’, V-14 2941. Both were sentenced to be hanged, finally Katalin Havrilla Sticker was executed and the sentence of Mária Wittner was commuted to life imprisonment. The latter was released only in 1970. As yet there is no exhaustive study of the role of photographs as incriminating evidence in the trials after 1956 but Amélie Clément notes some examples in her master's thesis (Clément 1998, pp. 119 – 122).

¹⁷The collection is now accessible in the Historical archives of the state security's papers in Budapest under the name the ‘1956 Separate Collection’. According to György Sümegi (2004, p. 312) in the whole history of Hungary this ‘1956 Separate Collection’ represents the biggest abuse of peoples' rights by means of photographs.

¹⁸The pictures copied from Match and Epoca carry the reference number: V-150 381/10 in the HAHSS 1956 Separate Collection.

¹⁹On the control over pictures by political powers see the following: ‘If power makes use of images, it is always in fear of being denounced or betrayed by the power of the images, and is always tormented by a return of the original sense’ (Bergala 1976, p. 40, quoted by Clément 1998, p. 101).

²⁰At the same time as the repressions took place the Information Bureau of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic published a so-called ‘White Book’ in five volumes, with the same counter-revolutionary interpretation of 1956 as expressed by the exhibition. Four volumes were published in 1957 on the counter-revolutionary forces and one in 1958 on Imre Nagy's government; they were even translated into several western languages (including English, French and German) and contained many photographs of the revolution, but not the Paris-Match picture. For the English translation see The Counterrevolutionary forces … (1957).

²¹The first edition was followed almost immediately by a second improved edition in the same year. As is usual with all (communist) propaganda books, it pretends to give an objective analysis in that case, based on ‘interviews’ and ‘documents’, about ‘the true background of 1956’. The main thesis of the book is that the counter-revolutionary activity was organised with the help of the West from 1948 on and it had been waiting for the right moment when Hungary became the ‘battlefield of the international class fight’. The book focused on participants in order to point to their counter-revolutionary background and the imperialist and fascist character of their plot, with the help of photographs from the police 1956 collection. The Paris-Match photograph figures particularly among other photos of armed insurgents.

²²It is to be noted that the caption ‘The underworld in arms’ features also in the so-called White Book (relating to a different photograph) and can be seen as a typical caption in the service of the revisualisation of the 1956 pictures by the Kádár regime.

²³The Paris-Match photo as it appeared in the French magazine was first re-pictured, and then awkwardly retouched with a brush, perhaps in order to make the boy look more ‘hard-boiled’. Also the bad print quality transforms the original picture to its disadvantage. In the first edition of the 1967 book the picture looked overexposed, as opposed to the second edition, where it looked too dark.

²⁴Open Society Archives Home Affairs Film Studio, n 19, Budapest, Central European University.

²⁵Between 1958 and 1986, the thirtieth anniversary of the events, no new documentary film was made. Indeed in 1986, the October events were incorporated into a documentary on TV—still under strict State control—about the 40 years of Communism in the country (Clément 1998, p. 70).

²⁶The book was also widely distributed in the socialist bloc and was translated, at least, into Russian (1969), Polish (1970), Estonian (1972) and Czech (1972)—but without publishing the Paris Match picture. Jutka was aware of the publication of her picture in the Hollós book. She corresponded with her parents who—her husband claims—talked her out of returning home because they were frightened that the photograph of her would lead to her being recognised by the police who would then hold her to account [interview with Steven Toth (husband) in June 2002 by Phil Casoar; interview with Rózsa Solymosi (sister-in-law) in May 2003 by Eszter Balázs]. Both the fear of Jutka's parents and her own fears seem well founded in the light of the dossier opened by the Hungarian Central Alien Control Office in 1976 (HAHSS, Central Alien Control Office on Juliana Sponga, Department III/2, later Department III/II-9). Police knew her name from testimonies in the Mária Wittner and Associates trial (see Trial of Mária Wittner and Associates, V-14 2941). However, it appears from the Ministry of the Interior registration that Jutka's name and the photograph taken of her in 1956 were not successfully linked, either directly following the reprisals, or afterwards. The fact that she had emigrated to Australia was unknown to them as she was recorded as being ‘stateless’. According to the Central Alien Control Office material—it is not clear why dating from July 1978—she was included in the list of prohibited persons and her data were transferred to the combined computerised records (EGPR) of the state security organisations in 1985. Her inclusion in the list of prohibited persons was reconfirmed annually until 26 June 1989, which is the day that registration was discontinued. It is a double tragedy that Jutka passed away less than a year after her name was removed from the records. A full account of Jutka's destiny can be found in Casoar and Balázs (2006).

²⁷They produced two books on the events of 1956 in general (Hollós & Lajtai 1982, 1986). They had also produced an earlier book on the siege of the Communist Party headquarters at Köztársaság tér (Hollós & Lajtai 1974).

²⁸ Time magazine also reported on the Hungarian events, but it had not put any photographs of the revolution on its cover until the drawing of Chaliapine (Time, XLX1X, 1).

²⁹‘No revolution has ever solved the “social question” and liberated men from the predicament of want, but all revolutions, with the exception of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, have followed the example of the French Revolution and used and misused the mighty forces of misery and destitution in their struggle against tyranny and oppression’ (Arendt 1990, p. 112). On the role of the councils as spontaneous organs of action and of order emerging during the revolution itself, see Arendt (1990, p. 271).

³⁰On this postcard it is also written: Série ‘Les mauvais jours finiront’, n 4 (Bad days will be over), both an allusion to a song of the Paris Commune, and to an article published in L'Internationale Situationniste in 1962. For the editor of the postcard, a fictional name and location are given: Editions Négation de la Négation, Avenue de la Grande Perruque, Budapest.