He is a uniquely versatile creator of Hungarian photography: photographer, visual anthropologist, historian, writer, explorer. It is this versatility that allows him to explore intellectual and material culture as one, to discover ancient links between cultures that are distant in space and time, and to show us these through his images and writings.
The early period of his oeuvre is characterized by philosophical, even surrealistic images. He experimented with many techniques of image manipulation (e.g. high-low-key, relief effect, expressive landscapes that do not exist in reality). Certain motifs are often only indicative in his pictures, which contain very few elements. Over time, he found the style and tone that best suited his subjects.
He captured fading forms of life, disappearing situations in different parts of the world. The essence of his art can be captured in the professional perfection of his photography, in the superb creation of well-composed, to the point photographs. His method could be called an active visual anthropology. It is the painstaking fieldwork and the experience that makes his work authentic. He is an expert in at least three fields: a trained ethnographer–writer, a cultural historian–philographer with a great knowledge of the subject, and a superb photographer who presents the visual with a sophisticated technique.
László Kovács was born in Endrőd (now Gyomaendrőd) in 1942, the seventh child of the schoolmaster. Their family also suffered during the Rákosi era [1945-1956]. From a young age, he participated and won prizes in national photography exhibitions. After graduating from the Szeged Teacher Training College, he taught for a year in Békés County, and in 1964 he took up a post at the MTI [Hungarian Telegraphic Office] in Budapest. He graduated from the journalism school of MÚOSZ [Hungarian National Association of Journalists] and worked as a photojournalist at MTI for a decade. During this time, he took on the journalistic and artistic name Kunkovács. MTI sent him on study trips to Moscow and the Baltic Republics for TASS [Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union], to Berlin for AND [General German News Service], and then on a mission to Mongolia and a longer one to China. This also took him to Tibet.
As a travelling photojournalist, he sought out, photographed and wrote about his subjects himself. He specialised in curiosities not found in guidebooks. As a cave explorer he was present at several excavations in the 1960s and 1970s. These images enrich the Speleological Collection at the Pál-völgyi Cave [in Budapest]. He took pictures of active volcanoes in the Mediterranean as part of a volcano expedition in the early 1970s. He was one of the pioneers of underwater photography in Hungary. He photographed abandoned medieval mines (his pictures of the former precious opal mines in the Eperjes [Prešov, Slovakia] mountain range are unique), other geological curiosities, rare bird species and ancient workshops. He has reported on many archaeological excavations.
Several of his works have been included in the comprehensive exhibitions of photographic historical significance entitled 125 Years of Hungarian Photography and TÉNY-KÉP at Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle). He was also a regular participant in the major collective exhibitions of the Art Fund and later of the MAOE [National Association of Hungarian Creative Artists] and the Association of Hungarian Photographers.
The years spent at MTI gave László Kunkovács knowledge of the country, perceptiveness and routine, but being of a meditative and inquisitive nature, he decided to go freelance after ten years. He continued his training in ethnography.
In the meantime, between 1973-1976, he was head of a photography workshop and lecturer at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. He illustrated books and edited magazines. He was recalled to MTI as a columnist, where he later became art editor. Since 1990, he has been an independent artist, a kind of one-man institution–many have written about him.
Since the first half of the 1980s, he has been exhibiting thematic exhibitions. He is interested in the everlasting deep layers of our culture and traditions that unite humanity. Comparative ethnography has provided a method for learning about different peoples (Southern Italian, Ukrainian, Udmurt, Mari, Bashkir, Khanty, Mansi, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, Turkish, Altai, Khakass, Tuvan, Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Yakut). His writings on ethnography, cultural history and nature conservation have appeared regularly in newspapers, magazines (often organised in columns) and volumes of studies.
In 1990 he was awarded a two-month scholarship by the Hungarian Academy of Rome. He was often invited to art and photography creative camps: Baja (1993), Balmazújváros (1976 and 1980), Hódmezővásárhely (2007), Hortobágy (1994, 1996, 2001, 2005), Nagybaracska (1995), Nyírbátor (1988, 1989), Damjanich Museum's research and creative camp (1982), Tiszakécske (1983, 1985); Hungarian Institute of Culture, Tokaj (1989, 1990, 1991, 1992), Tiszakécske, Hortobágy, Berekfürdő (2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009), Gergyóalfalu (Joseni, Romania) (2006), Gergyóremete (Remetea, Romania) (2007), Plovdiv - International Camp of Photographic Art (1989), Szabadka (Subotica, Serbia) (2003), Szováta (Sovata, Romania) 2001 (MAOE scholarship). In 2006, he was a member of the Writers' Creative Camp in Berekfürdő led by Anna Jókai, and in 2015, he was a participant of the Tokaj Writers' Creative Camp.
So far, he has put together twenty-one exhibitions of ethnographic and cultural history photography on various subjects. These have been exhibited in 150 places in Hungary (Budapest History Museum, Hungarian National Gallery, Vigadó Gallery, Lajos Street Exhibition Hall of the Budapest Gallery, Duna Gallery, Vajdahunyad Castle, etc.) and in seventeen cities in seventeen countries–in museums and Hungarian institutions abroad.
The structure of the Kunkovács archive:
Fairs
He photographed fairs in more than thirty villages. He kept returning to prestigious fairs in Kunszentmiklós, Hajdúnánás, Dabas, Hatvan, Nagykőrös, Kiskunhalas, Szabadszállás, Bugac, Hortobágy Bridge Fair, Endrőd, Pécs. He also visited the famous border towns of Körösfeketetó (Negreni, Romania), Bánffyhunyad (Huedin, Romania), Máramarossziget (Sighetu Marmației, Romania). Since the early 1990s, this theme has been inevitably reduced, as the fairs have become scarcer and shallower. Most of his peasant portraits were taken at the fairs. Faces, as Kunkovács says, are not repeated, but become history.
Other festivals - from horse shows to folklore festivals
From the early 1970s, he attended the Apaj-puszta and Hortobágy-Máta horse shows for a decade. Another large group of festivities were the harvest festivals of the regions, such as the Szekszárd Harvest, which represented the folk art of many villages. The harvest festivities and balls of a village were also often captured. Palóc Days in Parád [Palóc are a subgroup of Hungarians in Northern Hungary and southern Slovakia] and on several occasions in Balassagyarmat, a fair in Tokaj and Érsekcsanád. He also regularly attended the Danube Folklore Festival in the 1970s and 1980s which took place in several villages. Around the same time, he also visited the Hungarian settlements of Zseliz (Želiezovce) and Gombaszög (Gombasek) in Slovakia; regularly attended the Festival Folk Arts and a host of other traditional events, but as the craftsmen were out of their environment, he rarely took photographs, preferring to meet them, take notes and later visit them in their workshops. In Zengővárkony, he photographed the Meeting of Sárköz Folk Dance Groups in 2009 on a digital medium.
Popular religiosity
From the 1970s to the 1990s he mostly captured the religious customs, shrines and church fairs of the Catholic regions, Palócföld and the "many-skirted" villages from the river Galga to the river Zagyva. There are thousands of images of the village of Boldog alone. He has also photographed religious celebrations beyond the border: Easter in Szék (Sic, Romania) in the first half of the 1970s, the Csíksomlyó (Șumuleum, Romania) pilgrimage five times in the 1980s and 1990s, the Easter ritual boundary procession in Gyergyóújfalu (Suseni, Romania) at the turn of the millennium.
Folk customs
He regularly recorded the folk customs of the year. Many of these can only be found in his photographs, such as the tradition of burning a straw effigy (’kisze’) in Szandaváralja. He always sought the untouched, the original, and avoided reenactments. Decades ago, in its still unregulated form, he captured the Busó procession [an annual celebration of the Šokci living in the town of Mohács, Hungary, held at the end of the Carnival season] on several occasions. It was mainly through his ethnographic reports that the country learned about the ‘tikverőzés’ [a local tradition of Carneval season] in Moha from the 1970s onwards. Carnival of Elek, maypole display, dancing around the maypole (Délegyháza, Isaszeg) from the 1970s, 1980s. Weddings in characterful areas such as Galga-vidék, Kerekegyháza, Kunszentmiklós, Dunaszentbenedek near Kalocsa, Tiszaladány, Kunmadaras. In the wedding in Boldog, by the river Zagyva, the ritual wedding pastry was the most ostentatious occurrence of the bread cult in the whole Carpathian Basin. A series of photographs taken in 1973 preserves its last, non-revival occurrence. The nativity scene in Dunavarsány, the procession of the Three Magi in Endrőd. He also went to Bulgaria during three winters for the animal-masked winter celebrations: he captured thousands of masked ‘masqueraders’ in more than a hundred villages. His method included returning to a particular location several years later to show the changes.
Cemeteries. Archaic grave markers
He documented grave markers from home and abroad: from the Jewish cemetery in Apostag to the ‘Cemetery of the Boatmen’ in the Estonian fishing village, and the cemetery of the Reformed Church in Visk (Viskovo, Ukraine) in the former Máramaros County. From this theme branches off the collection of burial sites in Asia, which are numerous from the Urals to Tibet.
Ancient buildings, the deep layer of architecture
‘Ancient buildings’ is Kunkovács's catchphrase. For two decades from the 1970s, his themes were mud buildings, round pens and traditional outdoor clay ovens called ‘banyakemence’ in the back of farmsteads, thatched enclosures and other pastoral structures in remote wildernesses: a deep layer of our culture that has echoes with tribal architecture. In his research, he sought parallels from southern Italy to western Mongolia. His photographs have since inspired many of our renowned architects. He also sought to record the renaissance of ancient architecture.
Old crafts
From the 1960s onwards, he sought out the often-last representatives of the historic crafts, their magical workshops, and with a keen eye for the workflow, he took meticulous photographs. He captured the rawhide shoemaker (‘bocskor’), Szeged slipper maker, paprika miller, millstone carver, well digger, cellar digger, charcoal maker, travelling lime burner, coppice cutter. Cowbell smith and shepherd’s crook maker, nougat maker, candlemaker. Tapered straw basket (‘kópic’) maker, wooden toy and tool maker, basket maker, mudbrick maker, reed mat maker, cart body basket maker, leather tanner, harness maker, blue-dyer, cooper, the last shipwrights, tinsmith, sieve maker, cordwainer, boot-maker, rope-maker, carpenter and wheelwright, blacksmith, weaponsmith, coppersmith, blade sharpener, weaver, Hungarian-style taylor, Hungarian-style furrier. Felt making, uninterruptedly, has survived in our country among shepherd's hat makers. Kunkovács was friends with hundreds and hundreds of craftsmen. It is typical that he visited sixteen knife workshops in the country and tried to capture them at fairs with their entire stock of goods.
Farm life, farm work
From his youth, he was interested in the world of the farmstead and the work carried out there, of the Alföld (Great Hungarian Plains), from the clustered farmstead of Nyírség to the southern border, which in the meantime has become agricultural history. He captured, probably for the last time, the threshing process in Móricgát and Zsana, paying attention to each stage of the work. The subject is a scarcely published part of his archive.
Fishing and herding
He researched and photographed traditional fishing mostly in the 1980s. He searched for and found parallels in the Lower Danube region in Bulgaria, at the Khanty and Mansi of the Ob, and in the Ural from here in Udmurtia. Shepherding and the everyday life of people living in remote wilderness areas were his main concern for most of his life. He captured the Asian parallels during dozens of expeditions in the 1990s.
Image of landscape units
Everywhere he went, he tried to capture the character of the countryside. His academic readings helped him greatly in this. When he travelled around the country, without an affiliated institution, he could not think of staying at hotels. Sometimes he in stayed low quality guest rooms and made the rounds in a borrowed car or on a bicycle. The artists' residences gave him the opportunity to travel up to 30-40 km rounds to document his surroundings.
Ancient beliefs
His photographic finds and his writings prove that he managed to dig down to pagan roots on Hungarian soil.
Traditional flood-based cultivation
At the border of Kecskemét and Nagykőrös, he documented the advanced horticultural culture that operated with pre-mechanization horse-powered water-lifting devices during its final period, in the early 1980s. All of this has since disappeared without a trace
Women's life
He also documented traditional women’s tasks: bread baking, plastering, whitewashing, large-scale washing, pounding clothes in the stream, going to the market, sending ‘komatál’ (food gifts), poultry keeping, milking, and dairy work.
Visiting the neighbours
In the 1960s, he toured Poland and Bulgaria with his awakening interest in ethnography, with Tamás Cseh [musician, 1943-2009] as his hitchhiking companion. The nomadic generation of the 1970s turned to folk culture and discovered Transylvania, Kalotaszeg (Țara Călatei, Romania), the Szék (Sic, Romania) and Csángóföld (Csángó Land, Romania). Kunkovács followed suit at the same time, but never as part of a larger group. He also tried to survey the Felvidék (Upper Hungary, Slovakia), from Csallóközt (Žitný ostrov, Slovakia) along the river Garam to Gömör (Gemer, Slovakia) and the Bodrogköz beyond. Kárpátalja (Transcarpathia, Ukraine) and Southern Hungary were not left out of his destinations. Several times he took part in the Fisherman's Festival in Kopács (Kopačevo), Croatia.
"Walking among distant peoples in search of our own culture"
In the second half of his life, he made regular trips to the East: backpacking expeditions, sometimes with students who spoke the language of small nations – Dávid Somfai Kara, Szilárd Tóth – but mostly alone. One of the reasons for his decade-long travels in Asia was that one of his main subjects, lowland pastoralism, is of the Steppe type. Only a small part of his pictures he took among twenty nations have been published. His travels abroad often revealed subjects he had not expected. One such case was the two ways of domesticating the wild bee among the Bashkir.
The versatility of László Kunkovács is well represented by his published works, which not only show him as an excellent photographer, but also as a skilled ethnographer and a good writer. His writings have been published in ethnographic and archaeological volumes and numerous articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines on ethnography, sociography and nature conservation.
His previous independent publications include:
Ősépítmények. Népi építészetünk archaikus rétege (lit. Ancient Buildings. The Archaic Layer of our Folk Architecture) (Kós Károly Alapítvány – Örökség Műhely 2000, 2001, Könyvesműhely, 2014).
The instinctive tendency to build is dormant in today's human beings, and the crystal-clear archetypes of architecture that live within us are being recreated. A pedestal-like asset, it leads to unheard-of geographical and temporal horizons. (With English and German summaries and with trilingual captions).
Kece, milling, marazsa. Traditional fishing in our natural waters (lit. Kece, Milling, Marázsa. Traditional Fishing Methods on Our Natural Waters) (Balassi, 2001)
He photographed all the fishing methods and tools that existed at the time, and of course the fishing gear in use. Today, it is an unrepeatable work of great value.
Kőemberek. A sztyeppei népek ősi hagyatéka (lit. Stone People. The Ancient Heritage of the Steppe Peoples) (Masszi, 2002)
A little-known ‘sculpture park’ in the Eurasian steppe. No less a cultural heritage than Chinese terracotta soldiers, they are incredibly scattered across sparsely populated landscapes. This book is also internationally indispensable, because it makes the Turkic sacrificial statues easy to study with detailed photographs (with an introductory essay by István Erdélyi).
Táltoserő (Shaman Power) (Massif, 2006)
In the Hungarian, English and Russian language volumes, the Eastern and Hungarian recordings rhyme with each other, and the lyrical texts written to them are prose verses, according to Gáspár Nagy.
Képet adok (lit. I Give a Picture) (Könyvesműhely, 2013)
The photographer, who is also an expert in ethnography and writing, will present his career so far, from his very early photographs to his thematic exhibitions. It also includes a selection of his writings and articles about him. The volume is complemented by a data archive, which makes the author searchable. It includes data on 154 solo exhibitions by Kunkovács in Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Kazakhstan, China, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Mongolia, Russia, Romania, Turkey, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine. It includes bibliographical data on 216 of his writings on ethnography, cultural history and art theory, as well as 207 reviews and portraits of his books and exhibitions and four portrait films. The volume is completed by an index of names.
Pásztoremberek (Shepherds) (Cser, 2013)
The result of fifty years of fieldwork. His monograph is free of borrowings, making all his images and observations original source material. It focuses on the Great Hungarian Plain, with a broader Carpathian Basin outlook. Its final chapter, Bölcsességért napkeletre, (lit. For Wisdom Toward the Sunrise), discusses Asian nomadic pastoralism. The volume, supplemented by an index of names and an index of geographical names, contains 450 photographs taken between 1967 and 2012. (With summaries in English and Russian, and trilingual photo captions.)
Világjelek (World Signs) (Magyar Fotóművészek Szövetsége, 2016)
The ‘rock art library’ opens, revealing the prehistory of humanity. The result of ten years of collecting rock art and folk life in the imaginary triangle of the Urals, Tien-San and Yakutia. The book is in Hungarian, English and Russian, with a summary in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Altay, Tuva, Khakass, Yakut, Bashkir and Mongolian. It is supplemented by an index of names and geographic names.
The achievements of László Kunkovács's life's work are preserved in his archives and publications. His archive does not, however, include the photographs he took for MTI, where the negative and the user rights have been transferred to his employer and are kept there. The photographs are accompanied by his scrapbooks and audio recordings. His photographs were developed by him. He took pleasure in the execution and organisation of many of his exhibitions, and most of all he designed his own catalogues.
The photographer's ouvre is represented by his exhibitions and illustrated publications, which László Kunkovács has produced in impressive abundance: his recognition as a photographer is long overdue, but a full and comprehensive treatment of his work is still to come, since he has undertaken nothing less than "to bring together what has long been divided: science and art." Ahead of his time, he worked according to the methods of visual anthropology.
From his pictures, we see not only the history that lives with us, but also the future; from his photographs, life emerges. Nothing proves this more than the fact that his photographs have inspired eminent architects who have reimagined the noble and simple buildings of peasant farms as beautiful contemporary churches. In the words of painter Győző Somogyi: “…he found the living pieces of our past and can document them. Kunkovács is not building his own monument; he serves the Hungarian people. He brings to life those cultural fragments that have survived from the Scythians, Huns—indeed, from all horse-archer peoples—by photographing them. He photographs these objects and buildings in such a way that one feels the past, present, and future merge together.”
[2017]