Bäck Manci - Kárász Judit - Liebmann Béla - Müller Milós: A szegedi zsidóság és a fotográfia (Szeged, 2014)
Szabó Magdolna: Kárász Judit
22 Summary: She was born to a wealthy and well- educated Jewish family in Szeged on the21s! of May, 1912. She graduated from high school in 1930 and set out to study photography in Paris ( Ecole de la Photographie). She majored in photography in the Bauhaus school of Dessau between 1931 and 1932. Her master was Walter Peterhans, she attended the courses of Hans Albert and Vasily Kandinsky in the topic of "experimental materials and forms in paintings”. She was a classmate of Irén Blüh (Irena Blühova) and Etel Fodor, both ofwhom were photographers. From the early 1930s she developed a close connection with, and in 1932 she became the member of the Arts Workshop for the Youngsters of Szeged. She took social documentary photographs in Szeged, its neighboring areas and at the farms of the countryside. Her recordings can be considered to be the first major study pertaining to her hometown and lifestyle of the peasantry on the countryside. Even her earliest recording show signs of a unique perspective and choice of topic, her compositions carry a significant amount of Bauhaus-effect in them: bold and constructivist photographic form, materiale depiction, diagonal photo structure, light and shadow effect, and total photographic direction that is tilted or can be viewed from above. Similarly to other young artists of the Dessau School of Arts, she also became a member of the Kommunistische Studenten Fraktion (Kostufra), which got her expelled from the school. She was an employee of the DEPHOT (Deutsche Photodienst) photo agency between 1932 and 1935. She was a freelancer photographer in Berlin, in Bad Harzburg and in Cologne. In 1935 she moved to Denmark to escape the grasp of the Nazi Germany, she lived on the island of Bornholm for ten years, which was followed by a five year period of being a manual weaver in Copenhagen. In December of 1949 she permanently relocated to Hungary. She worked as a photographer of the National Center of Museums and the Museum of Applied Arts until her retirement. In 1960 she was admitted to the Alliance of Hungarian Photographers. Her workplace responsibilities did not allow her to fully immerse herself in her artistic photography. Her life's work remained a "torso”, her heritage was scattered, her recordings are held by several Hungarian public collections and the Bauhaus-Archiv of Berlin. During her roughly ten years of artistic career she was one of the pioneers of Hungarian social photography and was one of the most outstanding Hungarian photographers who attended the Bauhaus School
