Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Katalógus / Catalogue - VII. Belváros a női aktok keretében / A City Centre Framed by Female Nudes - Farkas Zsuzsa: A test képének nyilvánossága a 19. századi hírlapok tükrében / The Publicity of the Nude Pictures as Reflected in the 19th-century Press

gy, criminology and medicine - all used photography for their own specific purposes. The taxonomic system of the body allowed for differentiation of the portraits of criminals and other delinquents. The photographing of criminals had multiple goals: science stressed the edifying effect of these portraits, warning of the need to observe the norms of civic morals. The marginal strata were separated, branded and catalogued by photographs taken of their bodies. The importance of photographs in criminal registration increased, since they allowed for the visualisation of the criminal's physical appearance. From 1851 on, a new ordinance decreed that the art dealers of Pest had to submit copies of their wares to the police before showing them in their shop windows and selling them. The police acted as a vice squad but their jurisdiction did not cover paintings. The voyeur (peeper) was driven by an enthusiastic curiosity throughout the entire century. The whole population of Pest became voyeurs, as they could probe into the secrets of people displayed in pictures in shop windows. The windows of booksellers and art dealers became venues of effective advertisements. Groups of people were forming in front of shop windows all day. In 1854, it became a requirement to complement the ornate portals of shops: shopkeepers were carried away by a mania for shop-window decoration. Photographers were quick to realize that in order to be successful, their nude photographs should not merely depict the naked body, but should also imitate an artist's conception of the nude. A whole industry evolved on this basis, and through duplication its products spread throughout Europe. In 1860, it was quite obvious that some art dealers were selling stereo pictures that were frivolous and erotic. In 1871, a raid was carried out and 56,000 indecent and pornographic photographs were confiscated. In 1873, a phantom firm, H. Engel Exports from Hamburg, sold photographs of 15 ladies for 4 forints per set. The culture of the late 19th century fought against pornography and prostitution with diminishing success. In 1877, the police estimated the number of prostitutes in Budapest to be 1600. In a leading Hungarian daily newspaper, Pesti Hírlap, editorials castigated the deteriorating morals of the public, but in the advertising columns at the back of the paper risqué photographs were sold openly. A pornography scandal erupted in the southern part of the Banat region of Hungary in 1911. Detectives from the German Interior Ministry traced the material to the shoemaker Károly Geiger, who had acquired the photographs from France and Germany and had sent them on via the Porte (in Turkey). Eventually police enquiries led to Vilmos Wepple, a respectable citizen and editor of the newspaper Südungarische Zeitung who ran a business selling pornographic pictures. At the opposite end of the scale was the image of the beauty, and the fashion for this, too, was spreading. In 1874, a shop window in Pest showed photographs of sixty-four beauties of different nationalities. These female portraits were grouped by nation, country and race. In 1877, there was a call from Spain for a beauty contest on the basis of photographs. The first international beauty competition thus came about, but photographs of morally inappropriate ladies were burnt. A similar venture was launched for the international archaeological and anthropological congress held in the same year, when French anthropologists staged an exhibition of photographs of the most beautiful women of every European nation. The endeavour - called the world album of European beauties - received an input from Ferenc Pulszky, who took twenty Hungarian photographs with him to Paris. The positivist and rationalist fin de siècle was keener on a vision of the objective world. In the mid-19th century, photography meant modernity, as man equipped with a mechanical device captured and put on record the world around him. The period under study promoted through photography the development of a radically new visual language that could not be interpreted using the traditional methods alone. The startling and the deliberately shocking became instruments of art later on.