TIBOR HONTY: SOCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY 1935–1968

Curator: Jan Mlčoch
Graphic design: Štěpán Malovec

In the history of Czech photography, social photography is mostly associated with the worlwide economic crisis of the 1930s. Regrettably, though, social inequalities, poverty and penury are universal themes and the photographic camera recorded these phenomena from the medium’s very emergence. These issues were also reflected in the work of Tibor Honty (1907–1968), a native of the small town of Krompachy in eastern Slovakia, to whom this year’s last exhibition at the Josef Sudek Gallery operated by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague is devoted.

After completing his secondary school studies and mandatory military service in Prague, Tibor Honty enrolled in the School of Applied Arts in Bratislava, inspired by the Bauhaus school in Dessau, in the studio of ceramist Júlia Horová-Kováčiková. From 1933 he worked as a retoucher at the department of photogravure of the V. Neubert & Sons graphic design enterprise. At that time he already engaged in photography. In 1935, at the exhibition of French sculpture he discovered his life-long theme, the sculpture Pomona by Aristide Maillol, and, over the following decades, photographing sculptural works of Czech and foreign artists was his most highly regarded activity. During that same period, he also focused on social documentary photography.

Throughout  the thirties and at the onset of the war he made photos of makeshift housing settlements, captured life on the banks of the Vltava River and repeatedly took up the subject of funfairs, circuses and people involved in this way of life. He paid special attention to children and to shabby figures around circus caravans and shooting galleries, but also to monkeys and dogs – the companions of those eternal wanderers. In the atmosphere they exude, these photographs are suggestive of Italian Neorealism – a cinematic movement of the 1940s; he included some of the images in the series Circus Caravans (1940–1958). Tibor Honty patiently and deliberately captured the sad life in the rundown settings of that milieu. Already in 1948 Karel Teige characterized his work as “melancholic lyricism” in his article Cesty československé fotografie (The Ways of Czechoslovak Photography) in the journal Blok. Of importance was also his assemblage of photographs to form extensive series, inspired by music compositions arranged into cycles, among them Circus Caravans, From an Old Cemetery (1942) and Old Jewish Cemetery (1952). These works were followed by Civilist-style shots of the Libeň gasholder and of other areas of the city, which are suggestive in style to photographs by Miroslav Hák and artists of Skupina 42 (Group 42). In 1943 he left the V. Neubert and Sons enterprise and fully pursued photography. After the war, he joined the S.V.U. Mánes artists’ association and became one of the founding members of the photography department of the Union of Czechoslovak Fine Artists. Late in life, he worked in his native region that resulted in the series From My Trips in Quest of Gothic Sculpture in Slovakia (1966–1967). Tibor Honty died on 1 December 1968 in Prague.

We dedicate this exhibition to his collaborator and friend Jiří Mašín, who authored a monograph on Honty published in 1986. Irena Hontyová, who became an exemplary keeper of her husband’s artistic estate, also participated in the making of the book. Honty’s photographs are in the holdings of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.