The Budapest of Demeter Balla

Soviet socialism imposed many grim miseries upon the Hungarian people once the German occupation under the National Socialists was replaced by a Russian one under the Red Army. In 1945, Hungarians were allowed one free election in which the Communists were resoundingly defeated.

Two years later, the Russian occupiers allowed another election yet — despite violent intimidation and manufacturing as many as 200,000 false ballots — the Communists still only improved their vote share to 22%. But through various mechanisms it was enough to seize control of the government, take over the other parties, and merge them all into a pro-Soviet front.

A decade later, the 1956 uprising sparked a Soviet invasion to prevent Hungary leaving the Warsaw Pact turning off the road to full communism. It did, however, convince Hungary’s communist hardliners that while total control over all political, social, and economic institutions needed to be maintained, they also needed to lighten the mood. A little more carrot, a little less stick (but keep the stick).

Human beings have a way of sorting themselves out as best they can and persisting despite a multiplicity of hardships. These photographs of Budapest in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s by Hungarian photographer Demeter Balla (1931-2017) bear witness to the quiet dignity of the inhabitants of a capital city still stuck behind the Iron Curtain. (more…)

With 231 million Muslims, Indonesia today has the largest Islamic population of any country. The obligation of all Muslims who are capable to perform the Hajj — the annual pilgrimage to Mecca — at least once in their life meant that there was a continual flow of travel and traffic between the Arabian peninsula and the Dutch East Indies (as they once were).

The writer, photographer, and explorer Daniël van der Meulen was appointed the Dutch consul in Jeddah in 1923. Then followed three full years of intensive study of Arabic and Islam under the tutelage of the great Hollandic arabist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje before van der Meulen arrived in Arabia in 1926, just as the Sultan of Nejd, Ibn Saud, was securing his hold over the Hejaz.

The primary role of the Dutch consul at Jeddah was to look after the interests of the Netherlands-Indies pilgrims on the Hajj but, as that only took place once a year for several days, van der Meulen took full advantage of the down time to explore the Arabian peninsula.

Hadhramaut in Yemen was of particular interest to him and he completed several expeditions there between 1931 and 1944, forming strong friendships with many Hadhrami people along the way.

In 2003, the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT, or Royal Tropical Institute) in Amsterdam published Daniel van der Meulen in Arabia Felix: Travels and Photographs of a Dutch Diplomat in Yemen, 1931–1944 by Steven Vink, the photographic curator of the Tropical Museum.

It was published in cooperation with the Yemeni Embassy in the Hague and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Sana’a. William Facey of the British-Yemeni Society gives it a strong review here, but hard copies are tricky to get hold of.

Not all European journeys to South Arabia have proved as fruitful as van der Meulen’s. Thorkild Hansen wrote a book about the Danish expedition of 1761 to 1767, a ‘spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously awry’.

This 1962 book has happily been brought back to life in a recent printing from the ever-estimable New York Review Books.

Berenice Abbott took a few photographs of New York’s old Police Headquarters viewed from one of the gunsmiths across Centre Market Place.

This street behind the NYPD HQ (which fronts on to Centre Street) became the gunsmiths’ district of Manhattan — policemen being one of the best customers for many of these businesses. (Criminals being another.)

There is something almost mediæval about the giant gun hanging outside, advertising to one and all what the shop had to offer.

Frank Lava, the gunsmith photographed, shut decades ago, but the John Jovino Gun Shop was originally next door before moving around the corner into Grand Street.

Like Lava’s, Jovino’s continued the tradition of hanging a giant gun outside the shop like in Abbott’s photograph.

The John Jovino Gun Shop, founded 1911, chucked in the towel last year when “Gun King Charlie” — owner Charlie Yu — decided the rent was too damn high.

Will Pryce’s Photographs of the John Rylands Library

Will Pryce is one of the best architectural photographers out there and Country Life put him to good use for an article earlier this year about Manchester’s John Rylands Library.

The library was founded by the deliciously named Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her late husband, the merchant philanthropist John Rylands who became Manchester’s first multi-millionaire.

Manchester experienced a flowering of northern neogothicism in the nineteenth century, and the John Rylands Library is sometimes used as a film location standing in for Pugin’s Palace of Westminster, most recently in the 2017 film ‘Darkest Hour’. The city’s magnificent Town Hall fulfils this role even more often — c.f. the UK telly original of ‘House of Cards’. Scandalously, Manchester’s City Council no longer meet in their original council chamber, having decamped to the nonetheless handsome 1938 extension built next to it.

The John Rylands Library (and research institute) is here to stay though.

For more of Pryce’s work, see his website.

A hatted woman sits on a balcony, looking away out over the Plaza de Mayo, the Cathedral of Buenos Aires, and the city beyond.

It looks like the sort of thing taken by one of the French photographers, but in fact it is by a total amateur: Henry Dart Greene, the son of the Californian architect Henry Mather Greene (of Greene & Greene).

From 1928 to 1931, Dart Greene worked for the Argentine Fruit Distributors Company, founded by the Southern Railway to make use of the individual smallholdings long its line.

Upon his death, Dart Greene’s papers were deposited in the library of the University of California at Davis including this photograph from his time in Argentina.

While the building it’s taken from has been demolished and replaced with a bank, most of what you see beyond is still there.

While the old basilica was demolished in the 1700s and replaced with a baroque creation there is still plenty of Romanesque abiding at Großcomburg in Swabia. The monastery was founded in 1078 and the original three-aisled, double-choired church was consecrated a decade later. Its community experienced many ups and downs before the Protestant Duke of Württemberg, Frederick III, decided to suppress the abbey and secularise it. Many of its treasures were melted down and its library transferred to the ducal one in Stuttgart where its mediæval manuscripts remain today.

From 1817 until 1909 the abbey buildings were occupied by a corps of honourable invalids, a uniformed group of old and wounded soldiers who made their home at Comburg.

In 1926 one of the first progressive schools in Württemberg was established there, only to be closed in 1936. Under the National Socialists it went through a variety of uses: a building trades school, a Hitler Youth camp, a labour service depot, and prisoner of war camp.

With the war’s end it housed displaced persons and liberated forced-labourers until it became a state teacher training college in 1947, which it remains to this day.

Black-and-white photography is particular suitable for capturing the beauty and the mystery of the Romanesque.

These images of Großcomburg are by Helga Schmidt-Glaßner, who was responsible for many volumes of art and architectural photography in the decades after the war.

Crossing the Thames as I walked home from the pub last night, I looked down the river and saw the sturdy dome of St Paul’s standing out, illuminated in the winter night.

As it happens, it was exactly seventy-seven years ago last night — on the 29th of December 1940 — that the iconic photograph often called ‘St Paul’s Survives’ (above) was captured.

Hopeful as that sight must have been, it was a pretty grim time. But four and a half years later (below) the cathedral was illuminated not by the lights of enemy firebombs but by great searchlights forming a massive ‘V’ in the sky: it was 8 May 1945 — Victory in Europe.

Another year gone. We’ve survived.

(more…)

Stumbled upon the website of a firm called Thameside Media whose architectural photographer, Michael Ellis, has done some superb work in capturing English churches on film (metaphorical film, I suppose, now that the world has gone digital). (more…)

Between the vernal equinox and its autumnal confrère tomorrow there has been perhaps an excess of fevered activity. Aside from the usual time in London, I have been in Amsterdam, the Wolds of Lincolnshire, the Essex seaside, the Pyrenees, Kent, Paris (much scrubbed up since my last stay), Chartres, Oxford, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Lebanon, Midlothian, Connacht, and Norfolk. And before Christmas I should have two trips to Rome.

Regardless, here are just a few photos from the past six months, arranged in roughly chronological order and lightly explained, in order to keep you up to speed. (more…)

William Cecil James Philip John Paul Howard, 8th Earl of Wicklow (styled Viscount Clonmore from his birth until succeeding to the earldom in 1946) was received into the Church at the age of thirty in 1932. Having attended Mass with the family’s Catholic servants, he was banished from visiting the family home on Sundays in addition to being disinherited. He later married the architect Eleanor Butler who served in Seanad Éireann from 1948-1951. Above is one of three photographs of Viscount Clonmore in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

The photographs of “Manni” Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn

IT’S A CRACKING photo; the sort of thing guaranteed to irk the puritanical and bring a smile to the good-humoured. The thirteen-year-old Yvonne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn takes a swig from a bottle while her brother Alexander, just twelve, sits with a half-smoked cigarette. Taken aboard the yacht of Bartholomé March off Majorca in 1955, the photographer was Marianne “Manni” Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn — the mother of Yvonne and Alexander — who’s known by her photographic soubriquet of “Mamarazza”. (more…)

Some consider winter the time of death and desolation but I disagree. Winter for me is the incubation, the child in the womb, the seed beneath the soil waiting for the moment to sprout. Autumn, rather, is the time of melancholy and retrospection. Most of the trees here in New York are now bare, but before the leaves fell our friend the Brooklyn-based graphic & web designer Emily E. Owen (website here) caught these photographs of New York in the brilliant crepuscular light. The views are from Fort Tryon Park at the very top of the isle of Manhattan. (more…)

Scotland has been enveloped in snowfall, and the BBC has put a photo gallery up of reader-submitted images of the recent precipitation. The In Pictures feature of BBC News Online’s Scottish section has for years been one of my favourite parts of the website, offering a new series of photographs every week varying from the startling to the quotidian. Above is Michael Rennie’s view of a rather peaceful-looking Loch Ness. (more…)

“THE FIRST GROUP of photographs that I attempted of structures,” writes photographer David Goldblatt, “was a series made in 1961 on places of worship on the Witwatersrand. I came to this from two starting points. The first was a fascination with the idea of faith. Notwithstanding recurrent nightmares during childhood about the infiniteness of everlasting hellfire and uncertainty over the domicile of my unbaptised Jewish soul in the hereafter, arising from an otherwise happy primary school education by nuns, I don’t think I was ever able to believe in or pray to the deity with much conviction — except momentarily under extreme threat of imminent disaster. Neither nuns nor rabbi could ever enable me to transcend the banal with that leap of faith required of true believers. … I was — am — then, generally sceptical of believers’ beliefs but also in awe, and sometimes envious, of their ability to believe. If blind, unreasoning faith often repels me it sometimes moves and always intrigues.”

“Thus it was endlessly mysterious, even incredible to me that people — for the most part ‘ordinary’, ‘practical’ people, probably not much given to abstruse thought and discussion — should pour such effort and resource into the erection of structures devoted to so abstract an idea as God.” The photographer, understandably, doesn’t understand that, for we Christians, God is no less abstract than our father, mother, or neighbour down the street. “The ubiquity and persistence of the phenomenon, the immensity of humankind’s investment in God was to me quite awesome.”

“The second starting point for this early series of photographs of structures was an inchoate but growing awareness that whereas some structures seemed quite detached from this place, the Witwatersrand or, more broadly, South Africa, others grew almost viscerally from it. This seemed to have less to do with architecture than with indefinable qualities of ‘belonging’. I wanted to explore these notions and bring them into the light with the camera.” (more…)

Photograph by Dave Henniker.

Some Selections from the Work of Photographer Bernard Bravenboer

Bernard Bravenboer is a Stellenbosch photographer whose website I stumbled across some time ago. In their vivacity and their variety, Meneer Bravenboer’s photographs capture something elemental about life in the Cape. Here are some selections from his work. (more…)

A sidewalk café on a Sunday afternoon, Buenos Aires, 1964.

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