Things are Drawing to a Crisis
Luis Buñuel, Walker Evans, Theo Frey, the Workers' photography from the Netherlands, Kálmán Kata and others
Up till recently, we had no direct experience of the nature of the Great Depression; we only gathered information on it through contemporary documents and images. The photographic series of the time have become models of photojournalism, as well as representing outstanding examples of photo art, with often referenced pictures of symbolic value. Their effect has determined the major iconographic characteristics of the socially sensible approach.
Commissioned by the American Farm Service Agency (FSA), famous photographers, including Walker Evans (1903–1975), documented the daily life of “rural folk who desired and were struggling to improve their lot”, thus creating an enduring collective picture of the American nation.
Evan’s activity was unique not only to America at that time. This exhibition also presents the work of renowned or less-known photographers from different geographical regions. These are images by artists who deemed it important to depict the daily reality of the economic crisis and the painfully catastrophic social inequalities that are still so apparent today. By depicting the general concept of social inequality on the level of local daily life with such a dramatic power, they also revealed possible means of solidarity. Such is the work by renowned Swiss photographer Theo Frey (1908–1997), represented in this show by a series expressing the shocking poverty of peasant families living among the Swiss mountains, as well that of Kata Kálmán (1909–1978), with Tiborc, a photo-sociographical series that became a crucial work for the Hungarian ‘village research’ movement of the 1930s. The interwar period and the effects of the Great Depression were very sensitively documented by those working-class photographers who focused on the life of urban workers. In Holland they were called the arbeidersfotografen, in Hungary they were associated with the Labour Circle (Munka-kör). The latter staged the first exhibition of photojournalism in Szolnok, the 1932 From Our Life, which was later banned. The exhibition also features Luis Buñuel's soul-stirring film of 1932, Land Without Bread.
Curators: Péter Baki, Director, Hungarian Museum of Photography; Flip Bol, Netherlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam; Peter Pfrunder | Sabine Münzenmaier, Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur; Katalin Székely, Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
A Hayward Touring exhibition: Walker Evans: Photographs 1935–1936.
Dear Visitors, we inform you that in order to provide appropriate conditions for works of art there is a constant, rather low temperature in the exhibition rooms of Ludwig Museum. We do apologise for any inconveniences.
