Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 20. 1980 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1983)

Közlemények – Mitteilungen - Karlovits Károly – Beke László: The beginnings of Photography in Hungary. p. 249–267. t. LXXXIII–CIV.

followers in Hungary. Among the first was К r a m о 1 i n Alajos (1812—1892), a Pest pharmacist. He had served as a national guard during the 1848—1849 War of Independence, and had had to emigrate after the failure of the cause. Among others, his 1847 colored portrait of general Kiss Ernő (later one of the martyrs executed in Arad) has survived. Another talbotype, the portrait of Perczel Vince (1848), is also known. In addition, talbotypes were made by the little known T i e d g e János. (One of these is the portrait of the poet Vörösmarty from the beginning of the 1850's.) One thing that is known about this photographer is that by 1853 he already had a studio in Pest in 5. Kristóf square. Tiedge was much admired because of his photographs of various traditional folk clothing presented in London in 1862. The works left behind by Skopáll József (?-around 1860) a photographer in Győr, are of particular significance. He published the following advertisement in the local weekly „Hazánk" (Homeland) on the 29

th of April, 1848: "Report. The undersigned, here, reports humbly to the respected public that from this day onwards photographs are made on silver plate as well as on paper of any size and form. The pictures made are most beautiful and durable, and may be colored if desired.". In the "debris" of his studio there are more than one hundred pieces among which one may discover pairs of paper negatives and positives, open air pictures, colored paper pictures and photograps prepared for coloring from the beginning of the 1850's. A three piece series from around 1854 has also survived. These pictures were already taken on a glass negative, each of them showing the view from the window of Skopáll's studio. The time of exposure however was different in every case. For this reason, these pictures may be considered the predecessor of modern sequence photographs. Another picture of his studio from the early 1850's is taken with a camera designed by Skopall himself and manufactured by Voigtländer. The use of talbotype transparent paper negatives was gradually superseded by the application of transparent glass negatives from the beginning of the 1850's. The inventor of this method was a Frenchman, A. Niépce de Saint-Victor (1847). He used albumen (egg white) to fix the lightsensitive silver compound on the glass plate. In 1848 E. Blanquart, the English photographer, already used albumin paper for making prints. A year later G. Le Gray replaced albumen with collodium (nitro cellulose, called in the Hungarian of that time something which roughly translates into "cotton-glaze"), for making negatives. This procedure was published by the Englishman F. G. Archer in 1851, and thus opened the period the wet plate (or collodium) process in the history of photography, which lasted until the middle of the 1870's. The method is called "wet", because the glass negative could only be used after it was made wet. (The solution of albumen or collodium poured on the glass plate contained iodine salts. After the solvent material evaporated the plate was dipped into the solution of silver nitrate until a lightsensitive layer of silver iodide was formed on the surface of the glass.) The clumsiness of the wet plate process was particularly striking in landscape respectively open air photography. The photographer had to carry around an entire dark room. This is why the first decades of the history of Hungarian photography are dominated by pictures taken in the studios as opposed to those taken outdoors. Varsányi János was one of the first landscape photographers in Hungary. In the last half of the 1840's he took pictures for the journal of Vahot Imre titled "A Magyar Föld és Népei" (The Hungarian Land and its Peoples). His daguerreotypes however, may be reconstructed only on the basis of the prints made of them. Varsányi also took part in a publication of lithographs by Kubinyi and Vahot which was titled: "Magyarország és Erdély képekben" (Hungary and Transylvania in Pictures. Pest 1853—1854). The original pictures have been lost however. On the other hand, a number of beautiful landscape photographs made by Rosti Pál (1830—1879), have survived from the same period. These 30x40 cm pictures belong to the album titled: "Fényképi gyűjtemény, melyet Havannában, Orinoco vidékén és Mexicoban tett utazása alatt készített 1857. és 1858. évben" (Photographic collection compiled during his trip to Havanna, the Orinoco region and Mexico in the years 1857 and 1858; two copies of the album are to be found in public collections in Budapest, another exists in a foreign collection). Rosti emigrated after the War of Independence. He studied photography in Paris, from where he later went to Central America. His geographic and ethnographic observations were later published in the form of a book, "Úti emlékezetek Amerikából" (Travel memories from America. Pest 1861), however in this publication Rosti's photographs were utilized by graphic mediation and redrawn by Klette G. An enterprise, similar to the making of Rosti's album of open air photographs was that of Heidenhaus who took pictures in Hungary both in the capital and the country. These pictures were multiplicated by Osterlamm Károly and distributed in album form in Pest after 1860. There are relatively many pictures documenting the state of the Kassa cathedral during the 1850's and 1860's. The Saint Elizabeth Cathedral was reconstructed in the last half of the 1850's. The pictures taken of the cathedral offer an opportunity to compare the building before and after the reconstruction works. In addition, with the help of the pictures, changes can be traced made on the steel plate of A. Rohbock and J. Poppel. These artists copied a photograph from 1856. [The plate was used in the volume of Hunfalvy János, "Magyarország és Erdély eredeti képekben" (Hungary and Transylvania in original pictures) published in Darmstadt, 1860]. Because in the period under discussion, cliches were not available for making printed reproductions of sufficiently fine quality and rich tonality, it was a custom to use original paper pictures in books. A good example of this tradition is the portrait of the wife of Batthyány Lajos made by Simonyi Antal. This picture was directly inserted into the publication edited by Gyulai Pál titled "Részvét Könyve" (The Book of Compassion. 1863). Another multiplication technique was to make graphic copies in form of lithographs, steel plates, woodcuts, etchings etc. This procedure however, required the redrawing of the pictures. A special technique is presented in the "Magyar Fényképész" (Hungarian Photographer) written by Tömösváry László (Pest 1863) which was the first serious Hungarian book dealing with photographic techniques. The author described a method in which the original photograph was directly copied on a woodcut printing block by photoreproduction. This was followed by the traditional carving of the block. This technique was used in making some of the illustrations in the journal „Magyarország és a Nagyvilág" (Hungary and the World) in the year 1867. Photographs of the Dognácska Iron Works, Bogsán furness and Resica foundry were taken by A. Groll. These pictures were then turned into woodcuts by the carver Haske. One of the first war report photographs showing the Malakoff Fortress was published in the form of a colored lithograph in the German magazine of M. Auer titled "Faust" (1855). It was probably the American photographer James Robertson who took the picture. In relation to this photograph it is worth mentioning that there were only two other photographers in the Crimean war. One of them was Roger Fenton, a fellowcountryman of Robertson, while the other was a Hungarian Szatmári Papp Károly (1813—1887). Unfortunately, his photographs are not known in Hungarian collections. Another print from the same journal is associated with a different aspect of replication techniques. The "natural self print" (Naturselbstdruck) may be of some interest here although, it is not closely related with photography or printing in a strict sense. The principle of Alois Auer's method (licensed in 1852) is that the original object (for example a leaf or laces) to be reproduced was pressed on the printing block. The picture then could be colored at will. The spreading of many various "types" (tintype, pannotype etc.) was also the result of the innovation of wet plate process (collodium technique). All of these provided additional proof of the photographers' perennial desire to experiment. Some years after the invention of the collodium negative A. Martin, a French physicist, discovered a method of making collodium positives. This innovation allowed pictures to be photographed or copied directly on a wide range of materials without the mediation of a negative. Many such techniques are described in Tömösváry's book as well. One of these collodium positive techniques is tintype, which only became extremely popular by the end of the century. 253