Béla Kása may be regarded as the most important visual chronicler of the vanishing peasant culture and way of life.
He was born in Pécs and emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany in the summer of 1965. He was thirteen years old at the time and did not leave Hungary of his own accord, but followed his parents. The authorities of the Hungarian People’s Republic allowed each adult to take only a single suitcase of personal belongings, so the Kása family boarded the train with just two pieces of luggage. He accompanied his parents with mixed feelings: he felt at home among his friends and had no desire to go to a foreign country whose official language he did not even speak. Yet there was no choice in the matter; he had to go.
For years, he struggled to find his place in the Federal Republic of Germany. Initially, the Kása family were accommodated in a temporary reception camp near Nuremberg. His parents later settled in Rastatt, close to the French border, while his sister worked for their uncle, and he was enrolled at the Burg Kastl German-Hungarian Bilingual Secondary Grammar School, located to the south-east of Nuremberg. Alongside German state and church funding, the school was sustained by the generous financial and material contributions of Hungarians living in the diaspora, enabling it to become a unique institution in which hundreds of students of Hungarian origin living in Western Europe, altogether spanning three generations, were able to obtain the Bavarian Abitur [university-entrance qualification].
The years spent in Kastl proved to be of decisive importance in Béla Kása’s life. Among other things, it was there that he acquired a lifelong passion for photography. After completing the secondary grammar school, in the early 1970s, he moved to Karlsruhe to live with his sister, who secured him a position at one of the local photographic studios. For six months, he worked as a general assistant: at first, he tidied up the studio and swept the floors, later he loaded sheet film into the cassettes of the large Sinar camera, sometimes thirty or forty pieces at a time. In time, he was allowed to work behind the camera and, on occasion, to operate the remote shutter release.
Through Elke, a former photographic model who also worked at the studio, he was introduced to the then renowned fashion photographer Ulrich Colling in Düsseldorf, who recognised his talent and took him on as an assistant. The glamorous sphere of advertising and fashion photography captivated him for several years, while at the same time he completed his studies at an art college in Cologne. In the winter of 1976, encouraged by the prominent German photographer Peter Keil, he went to the headquarters of Stern, the oldest and one of the most prestigious German weekly magazines, where he presented a suitcase full of slides taken in Transylvania. Not only did they purchase the entire series on the spot, but they also sent him back to Romania. His subsequent photographs were so enthusiastically received by the editorial staff that they were published as a sixteen-page cover story in Stern in the summer of 1977. At the encouragement of Stern’s picture editor, Wolfgang Behnkhen, Béla Kása went to the editorial offices of GEO located on the same street, where his photographs were received with similar enthusiasm.
Journey to Transylvania, 1973
By then, he had already completed his decisive 1973 journey to Transylvania. He reached the region by hitchhiking with his friend Géza Deréky, and his month-long stay, particularly his experiences in the remote village of Sic (Szék), led him to begin photographing village musicians.
Already at the first Sic wedding he attended, his attention was drawn primarily to the musicians: he sat beside them and watched them play. Until then, he had only played the guitar and had not encountered bowed string instruments, and they completely captivated him. As he recalled, it was a young local man from Sic, Márton Tatár, who, sitting beneath the plum trees, showed him his first chords on the three-string kontra [a Hungarian instrument common in Transylvania, a type of three-stringed viola]. The young man did not know the names of the chords and simply played by ear, and Béla Kása diligently photographed the fingerings he used on the instrument. Later, Sándor Csoóri Jr. added annotations to the photographs, noting the chords, D major, B major, etc. Since the kontra has no frets, it took considerable time before he was able to produce a satisfactory sound on the instrument. Sándor Csoóri Jr., a founding member of the Hungarian folk music group Muzsikás, offered him considerable help and also served, both generally and for Kása personally, as living proof that this village musical tradition could be mastered even by a young person from an urban background.
On his return from the 1973 journey to Transylvania, during a prolonged stay in Budapest, Béla Kása became acquainted with the Hungarian representatives of the folk music revival. It was Sándor Csoóri Jr. who first drew his attention to the Bartók Dance Group, and it was through Csoóri that he attended one of its rehearsals at the Toldy Ferenc Secondary Grammar School. At that time, the Sebő-Halmos Duo, which had played a decisive role in launching the new wave of folk music, were performing in bars in Japan; nevertheless, he met Sándor Timár, Mihály Sipos, and Márta Virágvölgyi. Sándor Csoóri Jr. gave him two cassette tapes containing selections from the folk music collections of Zoltán Kallós, György Martin, as well as from his own fieldwork. Kása listened to these recordings repeatedly, until the tapes were worn out. It was at this point that he first discovered the band from Pălatca (Magyarpalatka) led by the Kodoba brothers, the band of István Ádám (Icsán) from Sic, as well as Mihály Halmágyi and János Zerkula from the Ghimeș (Gyimes) region. In 1976, he went on to found the band Cinege together with his friends.
In the second half of the 1970s, the Cinege performed one, two, or sometimes three times a month, primarily in Cologne and its surrounding area, largely before German audiences. They were invited to festivals, including appearances in Hungary. Radio recordings were made in Cologne and Berlin. Over time, the original trio expanded to include a bagpiper, a second kontra player, and a zither player. In Cologne, they held táncház events regularly for several years [a participatory Hungarian folk-dance event, as distinct from staged performances].
At the beginning of the 1980s, much to his friends’ surprise, Béla Kása left the advertising industry, which offered a secure livelihood, and relinquishing that security, he moved from the Federal Republic of Germany to the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. There is no precise date for his return to Hungary, as it was a process that unfolded over several years. His decision to return to Hungary was strongly influenced by the fact that, in the meantime, he had met the ceramic artist Erika Kovács at a bagpipe camp in Kaposvár; they fell in love and were married on 21 May 1983. The wedding was held at the Gyűszűs farmstead in Üllő, and virtually everyone from the táncház circles was invited, including György Lányi, the kontra player of the band Téka. It turned out that Lányi’s wedding was scheduled for the same day. As the two couples shared the same circle of friends, and it would have been impossible for people to attend two weddings at once, they decided to marry separately but to hold a joint, three-day, ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ wedding celebration together.
At this time, Béla Kása became a highly sought-after photographer among bands associated with the folk music revival. He photographed Muzsikás as early as the year of its founding, in 1973, producing a series of slides in the woods of Szabadság Hill, followed by another photographic series at Fisherman’s Bastion. Virtually, every iconic photograph of Muzsikás from the 1980s and 1990s is associated with his name. This reflected not only his exceptional abilities, but also the fact that the members of Muzsikás became his closest personal associates within the táncház scene. The band’s lead violinist, Mihály Sipos, recalled that Béla would spend weeks preparing for these photographic sessions, selecting the location and creating an atmosphere that allowed time for eating, conversation, and recollection, while the photographs were taken almost unnoticed.
Alongside Muzsikás, he maintained close relationships with the members of Téka and Csík zenekar from the outset.
From the spring of 1983 onwards, a compilation album associated with regular meetings centred on the táncház movement was published every year. The records made it possible to trace not only the continuous emergence of new talents and changes in internal dynamics within the movement, but also to discern a conscious editorial concept: each cover was conceived as a reflection on the transmission of tradition by the editor Péter Éri (Muzsikás), the graphic designer Ágnes Ménes, and the photographer Béla Kása. Since the meetings regularly featured so-called survival musicians, it seemed self-evident that one of them should appear on the cover alongside a musician from the Hungarian táncház scene.
A Musician Farmer From Tordas
After marrying in 1983 and returning to Hungary permanently, Béla Kása and his wife settled in Tordas, in Fejér County. He realised a long-held ambition, running a traditional small-scale farm: he kept a horse, a donkey, goats, sheep, and rabbits, mowed the fodder himself and gathered the hay, and his family grew steadily, with Kelemen born in 1984, Róza in 1987, and Bíborka in 1990.
In addition to these commitments, whenever time permitted, he enjoyed making music with various bands. This took place primarily in Martonvásár, where the Százszorszép Dance Group, formed from students of the local primary school specialising in music, was later joined by an accompanying band, which began to perform independently under the name Lókötő. One of the band’s recordings, Mezőkölpényi Táncmuzsika (lit. Dance Music from Mezőkölpény), was included on the 1989 táncház-meeting compilation. In Lókötő, Ferenc Salamon was the lead violinist, Béla Kása played the hurdy-gurdy and the kontra; Endre Liber played the viola (and the cimbalom [cimbalom is a type of chordophone composed of a large, trapezoidal box on legs with metal strings stretched across its top and a damping pedal underneath]), Róbert Liber played the double bass, and Katalin Gyenis provided the vocals.
In the second half of the 1980s, the name and the line-up of Lókötő changed. It was renamed the Marton Band, and Béla Kása left the group. He first performed Hungarian folk music with the band Ördöngös, and later Moldavian and Ghimeș repertoires with Kabóca. In addition, he appeared on a hussar-themed cassette released by the Történelmi Lovas Egyesület (Historical Cavalry Association) (1849 – Tavaszi hadjárat. Huszár- és katonaénekek [lit. 1849 – Spring Campaign. Hussar and Soldiers’ Songs], 1995). He contributed as a singer, alongside musicians such as László Porteleki, Tamás Gombai, Mihály Dresch, and Lajos Hollókői, and he appears on the cover of the cassette in hussar uniform. In the 2000s, he continued his musical career as a drummer and hurdy-gurdy player with Igriczek, an early music and Hungarian folk band formed on the basis of friendship, releasing two CDs with the group. With his physical presence and personality, Béla Kása proved an excellent fit for the band. As with Ördöngös and Kabóca, he regularly performed abroad with Igriczek, often accompanying his own photographic exhibition openings.
In the mid-2000s, he was involved in a life-changing cart accident. He spent a week unconscious, followed by six weeks in hospital; one of his legs required surgery, he relied on crutches for months, and it took more than four years before his dizziness finally subsided. It is noteworthy that throughout this period he never once took up a camera. However, he remained focused on the goal of returning to India, where he had photographed semi-nomadic communities in 1998 for the first, and until then only, time. At the same time, he remained active as a musician: over the past decade he has regularly played the kontra and the double bass and, among others alongside Soma Salamon and Krisztián Kiss, has played the gardon [a folk musical instrument played in Hungary and Transylvania; it is similar in appearance to a cello, but played percussively] and drums in the Tordas Trió.
Portraits of Transylvanian Musicians
Béla Kása’s long-standing engagement with Transylvanian folk music and its largely Romani practitioners is well established. For decades, he has worked tirelessly in the field, documenting this world, and even if he was not able to reach every village that would have merited attention, it is largely thanks to him that the world knows not only the music of several hundred musicians, but their faces as well.
From these musician portraits, he presented a solo photographic exhibition at the Institut français de Budapest in January 1996 (appropriately, the opening was accompanied by a performance by Muzsikás) and, a year later, drawing on material accumulated over more than two decades, he published an impressive bilingual English-Hungarian photo album entitled Erdélyi zenészek (lit. Transylvanian Musicians).
Béla Kása photographed Transylvanian musicians almost without exception in their own environments (or at the Negreni [Körösfeketetó] fair, which he regularly visits). Between 1997 and 2001, he was presented with an unexpected opportunity to photograph a total of forty-five bands within the framework of the Utolsó Óra (Final Hour) Programme at the Fonó Music House of Buda. This included many musicians whom he had not previously been able to reach, for example musicians from Maramureș (Máramaros), Florești (Szászfenes), Dămuc (Gyergyódamuk), and Sămboieni (Erdőszombattelke).
He cannot give a precise figure for how many Transylvanian musicians he has portrayed to date, but the number certainly exceeds one hundred and fifty. On some occasions, he did not even record their names: for example, when photographing Stroh violin players in Bihor (Bihar), Maramureș, or at the Negreni fair; flute players and koboz [a multi-stringed instrument of the lute family of folk origin popular in Hungarian and Transylvanian folk music] players in Moldavia; and cimbalom players and bagpipers in Székely Land. In the early 1980s, together with Sándor Csoóri Jr., he sought out hurdy-gurdy players on the Great Hungarian Plain, which led them, among others, to János Pálinkó, a musician who was probably never photographed by anyone other than Kása.
In addition to his extensive work documenting Transylvanian musicians, Béla Kása produced several other photographic series. For instance, for many years, he photographed the potters of Vadu Crișului (Körösrév). His ceramic-artist wife told him that in this Bihor County village near the King’s Pass (Pasul Craiului, Királyhágó) that the village had once been home to between eighty and a hundred potters, producing, among other things, decorated jugs and elegantly shaped vászonkantas [a traditional Hungarian folk ceramic vessel, typically made of fired clay, whose name refers to the use of canvas during shaping to produce a coarse, textured surface]. Béla Kása regularly visited several of these elderly potters, and large-format, two-metre enlargements of the photographs he made of them are regularly exhibited at the Festival of Folk Arts at the Great Rondella of Buda Castle. Several figures associated with the folk music revival movement have reflected at length on Béla Kása’s work; a few of these accounts are cited below.
Péter Éri: “The experience that affected him so profoundly was the same one that repeatedly drew us, urban young people in Hungary with an interest in folk art, to the region. We encountered Hungarian instrumental folk music, dances, and a form of village life and community that were previously unknown to us and familiar only to ethnographic researchers. There we came upon a way of life wholly unlike our own, something we might have believed had already vanished. More than simply documenting with ethnographic authenticity a world that existed alongside us and was already disappearing, these photographs show that this way of life was still possible around 2000. Through Béla Kása’s photographs, we are invited into their festivities, celebrations, and everyday lives. At times, they pause, or briefly sit down, to meet our gaze. Béla Kása’s photographs make us want to believe that we, too, could be this beautiful, if we were capable of preserving our humanity in the way those depicted have.”
Béla Halmos: “Béla Kása himself learned to play music so that he could identify with what he was photographing. For our generation, folk music, whether encountered through the process of learning or through the collection of folk songs, is not the raw material of scholarly research, nor a means of musical arrangement or of developing an autonomous compositional idiom, as it was for earlier generations; rather, it is valued in its own right, for what it is. This quality is evident in Kása’s photographs, enabling them to contribute to what we recognise as the positive dimension of an entire way of life.”
Bob Cohen: “Béla Kása does not pass judgement on the impact of the modern world. He leaves that to us. In fact, he does not abandon his own culture in search of images of the Other. He finds the Other close at hand, in the neighbouring village, the neighbouring country. It is there that he discovers what our modernity regards as obsolete. The faces in his photographs do not belong to people living far away or in some distant past, although a certain sense of nostalgia may take hold of the viewer. However, it is not nostalgia that defines Kása’s work. Throughout Transylvania, he is known as the Photographer, and maintains a deep, personal bond with his subjects. He works as a village photographer for many families, with more of his images hanging in Transylvanian peasant houses than in Western galleries. When a family invites him to a wedding or a funeral, they know exactly who they are inviting, because he belongs to them. Béla Kása’s talent extends beyond the purely visual dimension of his photographic art. He is aware that his work is at once documentary and provocative. His photographs compel viewers to look inward and to reflect: ‘are we really so different?’”
András Berecz: “Where his contemporaries went with tape recorders and film cameras, he went with a camera. He collected folk music with a keen ear, but he filled a real gap when he began photographing musicians, primarily in Transylvania, who played traditional music. Over the course of his career, he moved from using many tools to working with very few. He worked with a compact Leica, using a 35 mm wide-angle lens, and produced black-and-white photographs. The 35 mm lens is ideally suited to bringing the face and the eyes close without distortion, while still capturing enough of the surrounding environment. These are the tools of the mature Béla Kása. Many beautiful and well-known pieces of music are inseparably linked to his images. By freezing a moment, his photographs tend to remain more firmly in the memory than film. The striking openness and honesty of his subjects derive in part from their social background and in part from the photographer’s tact.”
György Szomjas: “What he managed to achieve, beyond the fact that his photographs are made with affection and empathy, is a kind of stylisation that presents people as at once intensely real, strikingly close, and convincingly situated within their environment. And perhaps most importantly, it is capable of conferring a sense of elevation on the Figure, on the subject as a whole. He recognises the value embodied by these people. He is able to show not only the exotic or the signs of deprivation, but also the dignity of this way of life, even to the extent of creating its myth. He strives to transpose these people and these places into a new kind of aesthetic. In music, this is a more familiar substance, practised by many, but he may be the only one who has managed to achieve the same in photography. In this sense, he effectively joined the revival of the folk-music movement through another medium. His approach is more than simply a form of accomplished documentary photography, because it rests on a different attitude, a positive one: within the documentary image, he gives visual form to his idea of these people, this world, this culture. This is the essence of his style. The reconstruction of myth.”
Géza Deréky: “Although his art and oeuvre encompass many other fields, for me, he remains above all a visitor to the Transylvanian fairy garden, an explorer of its inner riches An explorer of a hidden world that only those can enter who searches quietly and humbly for its secrets, who reveals and brings to light the treasures and precious crystals concealed beneath the surface by genuinely descending into the depths himself, and by traversing the inner paths and winding passages of that world. Béla Kása may justly be described as a photographer who, following in the footsteps of the great predecessors, was able to move beyond the documentation of a declining peasant world to make new discoveries, and to draw our attention to new connections through his explorations. He discovered that in this world, things still possess meaning and significance: that what may appear to today’s people as backward, shameful, or long past its time in fact conceals a precise order, in which everything has its place, where the individual knows both their position and their weight within a familiar environment, and is aware of their own limits. He discovered that the people who opened up to him, as well as the objects he brought to life, each contain a world of their own: a multitude of distinct universes governed by a specific order and by their own inner laws.”
Gujarat and Rajasthan
Alongside the Transylvanian musicians and the potters of Vadu Crișului, Béla Kása has long been photographing the shepherds of the Hortobágy as well. Additionally, over the past decade, he has turned his attention to the Rabari people of India. The story began in 1998, when, in connection with his photographic exhibition, he came across a book in the office of Géza Bethlenfalvy, then director of the Hungarian Institute. The photographs it contained, taken in the 1960s by the Italian ambassador to India at the time, showed tall, striking figures in turbans and white garments who appeared very different to him from Indians as he knew them. He quickly noted down a few details and just as he had done in Transylvania when someone suggested a village, he set out to track down this unfamiliar community. From the place names mentioned in the book, he was able to establish that they were likely to live somewhere in the state of Gujarat, in the vicinity of the city of Bhuj
Eventually, through the son of a local textile merchant, he made contact with the Rabaris, and was deeply struck by what he found. In the space of barely a week, he shot thirty-two rolls of film, amounting to more than 1,100 black-and-white frames. The region captivated him to such an extent that he has returned repeatedly ever since, most recently in 2019, for the ninth time.
The friendships that were initially confined to Gujarat were later followed by contacts in Rajasthan. From Gujarat, it took him a day and a half of travel to reach a small Rajasthani village where virtually everyone made a living from music. In that village, musical knowledge is not acquired in schools but is passed down from father to son, from one generation to the next.
Béla Kása is not only a contemplative and discreet observer; he returns, time and again, to places where he once felt at ease, where he was welcomed and accepted, and where he was trusted to photograph without constraint in every situation of life. What mattered to him above all was how his subjects live their everyday lives, how they eat, how they sleep, how they dance, and how they make music.
To sum up, Béla Kása was able to bear witness to Transylvanian folk culture and its last major flourishing. Driven by instinct and passion, he documented this culture visually in a way that was uniquely his own. And when it began to seem that this world was slowly fading, chance took him to the other end of the globe, where he encountered a folk culture of comparable vitality that was still alive.
[2022]