Dr. Kubassek János: Cholnoky Jenő természetábrázoló művészete (Érd, 2002)
Judit Berta Varga: Jenő Cholnoky as Photographer - He conscious use of the camera
THE CONSCIOUS USE OF THE CAMERA is first great photographic undertaking was in connection with the investigation of China's coastal plain - a Sutter camera made in Switzerland helped him. With this camera, operated with 13x18 cm sheets of glasses, 18 photographs could be taken at one time. The clumsy and difficult operation of the heavy and huge appliance left such a deep mark on Cholnoky, that he even held it necessary to mention it in Iiis Utazásaim, élményeim, kalandjaim (My Journeys, Experiences, and Adventures), written 40 years later. In Iiis memoir he explained the use of the heavy camera with the unfamiliarity of the film that time. The reason of course, was something else, for the largest and best equipped photographic speciahst shop in Budapest, the company Calderoni and Partner had already sold manual cameras with coil casette before the turn of the century and they could be operated easily. The celluloidé roll film, which succeeded the sheets of glasses, and was produced by the largescale industry ready made - accompanied with the Kodak pocket cameras - reduced photography to pushing a button, leaving the risky task of developing and copying to the professionals. The times, when the landscape-photographers could start off conquering nature only with an equipment weighting more hundreds of kilogrammes, and with extra porter escort, vanished long ago. The French Aimé Civiale, who was active in the mid-19 m , was the first among the professional photographers to aim at the recording of the different shapes of the earth surface. . In 1859, he took more than 600 photos, among them more dozens of cineramas about the varied forms of the Pyrenees. His equipment of the expedition, which he led through the Alps' glaciers, weighted a quarter of a metric tonne together with more hundreds of sheets of glasses, darkrooms, chemicals and vessels. One of the other pioneers of landscape photography, the younger of the Bisson brothers ran a studio in Paris and tried to reach the 4807 m high peak of the Mont Blanc with several quintals of equipment, accompanied by 25 porters. His sensational undertaking ended up without success for the first time, but the steady work yielded its fruits at the second time - in the form of an album, which he offered to the imperial couple, to ///. Napoleon and to his wife, the Spanish countess Eugénie deMontijo. At the same time, the photography's conquest of the Rocky Mountains happened under similarly hard circumstances. The American William Henry Jackson documented the field work of
