A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 2007 (Debrecen, 2008)

Néprajz, kulturális antropológia - Szabó Anna Viola: „Sorsunk nézzük, ha egymást nézzük mi…” Ady Endre debreceni fényképei

Anna Viola Szabó THE DEBRECEN-RELATED PHOTOS OF ENDRE ADY There are altogether six photos ofthe poet Endre Ady (1877-1919) that are related to Debrecen: four were taken here and the only existing originals of two, though taken elsewhere, are kept in the Literary Museum of Debrecen. The literary collection contains ten further original portraits of him taken by Aladár Székely, but they are frequently published, emblematic photographs also available in other collections, so this time we ignore them. Three ofthe photos taken in Debrecen are the work of Ferenc Kiss, a studio and journalistic photographer. The photos taken in the newspaper office and its yard depict the 20-year-old journalist in set poses, in artificial situations still creating a natural influence. The portrait was taken by the Gondy and Egey photographer company in Debrecen, probably by Károly Gondy himself. According to legend, the picture was taken at the time ofthe young Ady's duel. The photo from Nagyvárad (Oradea) was taken in the photographer Ede Lembert's studio in early 1908, allegedly to celebrate the publication of Nyugat. The last photo was taken in Hűvösvölgy in Budapest by an unknown amateur at the time of Ady's medical treatment. During their dating and analysis the pictures had to be stripped ofthe legends attached to them, and we had to unravel the history ofthe picture based on the visual image alone. The traditional identification of all the pictures analysed in the present study was based on the traditions of memory. However, having examined and compared the elements of those traditions we found it clear that no solid walls could be erected from the building blocks of memory. Those who were personally connected to a photo, the circumstances of its birth or one of the persons photographed are unable to look at it with the exclusion of their emotions or their knowledge, which they claim to be reliable. Yet it is almost always misleading to identify a picture relying on only one's memory. A picture in itself, as an object and a channel of information can correspond to minute details of history, which become real and usable historical data only in an interpreting medium, as elements of stories. Similarly, the building blocks of memory can only be used in an interpreting medium, and this especially applies to Endre Ady and other mythic figures of "history around us": there are so many legends attached to them that the stories ofthe photographs cannot but conform to the legends. Memory fragments are completed, embellished, modified and contaminated in the personal past; while building a background to the picture, rememberers tend to confuse their own memories with legend, other people's memories, their memories of other pictures and readings. However, historical facts do not exist in the past but in the present, because they are created by historians from surviving traces. That is why facts do not speak for themselves. If we regard the photograph as a historical fact, we can only do so by creating it ourselves, attaching meanings to it, and speaking for it. We must find the clue to the way the photographer concealed the events he thought he saw: before declaring the picture a fact, we must therefore find out what the content ofthe picture meant to its creatorand how important and meaningful the depicted reality was in his eyes. Naturally, there is no absolute certainty about that, so we must always „explore the whole range of interpretations" and provide at least two narrative versions ofthe interpretation so that the narrated reality ofthe picture-fact is credible even if we go beyond the photographer's original intention. The past-related meanings in the photos of Ady can only be unravelled with the help ofthe narrative approaches outlined in the study, without choosing a particular one and attributing absolute truth to it.