Paul Almásy

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Almásy (born May 29, 1906 in Budapest , † September 23, 2003 in Jouars-Pontchartrain ) was a French photojournalist of Hungarian origin who lived mainly in Paris and worked as a photojournalist worldwide for over 50 years.

Life

Paul Almásy was born in Budapest and grew up there. He left Hungary at the age of 17 and studied political science in Vienna , Munich and Heidelberg from 1924 to 1928 . He became a journalist and wrote his first reports from Rome from 1929 to 1931 for the German press agency Wehr . To illustrate his articles, he took the first photographs in 1935 while on a trip to South America. In the following years, countless reports from all parts of the world followed: In 1936 Almásy crossed the Sahara in a car for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and undertook several trips to Africa at the end of the 1930s. During the Second World War, between 1940 and 1943 he wrote reports from France , Belgium and the Netherlands for the Swiss press . After the war, Paris became the center of his traveling life, for example, in 1950 he traveled to Indochina . From 1952 Almásy worked on behalf of UN institutions such as UNICEF , WHO and UNESCO , for which he traveled as an accredited employee.

In 1956 Almásy took French citizenship. From 1972 to 1989 he held professorships in Paris at the Sorbonne and at the Center de Perfectionnement des Journalistes . In 1993 Almásy was made a knight of the order Pour le Mérite . In 2003 he died at the age of 97 on his estate in Jouars-Pontchartrain near Paris. His estate contains around 120,000 negatives.

plant

Paul Almásy's subjects were people from all walks of life: “People like you and me”, but also ethnic and social marginalized groups, people from the upper and lower classes. Whether taken in a serious or bleak, documentary, cheerful or even funny context, the people in his pictures always retain their dignity. In his volume “Paris” you can feel a lovable approach to portray life on the street or the world of artists; his style is sometimes reminiscent of André Kertész and, in his witty and mischievous observations on the fringes of world history, resembles the pictures of Robert Doisneau .

Almásy also frequented noble society and bohemians and documented their festivals and rituals. Personally known u. a. with Otto von Habsburg and Baron Rothschild, over the decades he made interviews and reports with important people from contemporary history such as Begin , Khrushchev , Eisenhower , Charles de Gaulle , Mussolini, Pandit Nehru and the Shah of Persia, Rezah Pahlevi. Almásy has recorded remarkable portraits of many other public figures, which have gone down in collective memory - examples of artists from different origins are mentioned here: Alberto Giacometti , André Breton , Colette , Jean Cocteau , Jacques Prévert , Man Ray , Romy Schneider and Alain Delon and Yves Saint Laurent .

As a “watcher of world history” - a discreet, reserved, but never voyeuristic observer - of his epoch he worked on an “archive of the world”. One can definitely rate his oeuvre as such if one relates it to the topic of “man”, because all continents, many different cultures, all social classes, all human moods are represented in his work, which covers the most eventful times of the last century from the 1930s to includes to the late 1960s. According to his own statement, he had been active in every country in the world "except Mongolia". Almásy characterizes his way of working with an unbelievable understatement: "It was always chance that decided everything. I never looked - my camera was the viewfinder, I was just the finder." With this attitude Almásy has "found" quite a few valid pictures, which in a single shot say "more than a long report", even in his opinion. Although he is not primarily striving for it, many of his pictures are characterized by breathtaking authenticity and simple beauty, which reveal a very discreetly observing humanist behind the camera.

After his time as a reporter, his work was wrongly known only to specialists for a long time. The processing of his archive, which contains 120,000 negatives, is in the hands of akg-images and is far from over; What has been published in recent years, however, shows that the task here is to wrest the work of one of the greats in photo history from oblivion. In this context, in addition to newer book publications, an extensive exhibition took place in the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art around the turn of the millennium, which was followed by more in the Munich House of Art and also in Budapest , the capital of his actual home country Hungary. In spring 2006, parts of his early work were exhibited in the Opel villas in Rüsselsheim .

literature

  • Klaus Kleinschmidt (Ed.): Paul Almasy, Zaungast der Zeitgeschichte , Bern 1999, ISBN 3-7165-1156-0 .
  • Klaus Kleinschmidt, Axel Schmidt: Paul Almásy: Paris , Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7913-2597-3 .
  • Klaus Kleinschmidt: Paul Almásy: the early work , German / English. Braus, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-89904-174-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration
personal data
SURNAME Almásy, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French reportage photographer of Hungarian origin
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest , Hungary
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 2003
Place of death Jouars-Pontchartrain , France