KATI HORNA, PHOTOGRAPHY FIGHTS AGAINST OBLIVION

Kati Horna

Today, The Grandma is coming back home after visiting Reus. During her trip to Barcelona, she has been reading amazing news about a great discovery in Amsterdam, some boxes full of photo negatives of the Spanish Civil War taken by Kati Horna.

The Grandma has phoned Claire Fontaine, who loves Photography and History, to talk about this discovery and Claire has explained her lots of things about Kati Horna and her incredible work during this terrible war.

Before reading about Kati Horna, The Grandma had been studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 13. Images, diagrams and titles (V) (Spanish Version)

Kati Horna (Budapest, 1912-Mexico, 2000), Jewish immigrant photographer who put her camera at the service of the Social Revolution promoted by the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT-FAI during the Spanish Civil War.

Despite what has been understood in the past, their photographs from the war did not fall into the hands of Franco´s regime, disappear into the ruins or perish during the bombings. They were where they belonged, in the files of the offices where the photographers worked: the Foreign Propaganda Office of the CNT-FAI.

Just before the end of the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica managed to safeguard their archives by sending them to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

The archives, stored in 48 wooden boxes -known at the time as the boxes of Amsterdam- left the Comité Regional building of Barcelona that April. After a long trip with stops in Paris, Harrogate and Oxford, the boxes arrived in Amsterdam in 1947.

Kati Horna worked for CNT-AIT-FAI

Finally safe at the IISH, the archives remained closed for more than thirty years while the CNT survived in secret until the death of the dictator Franco. It was only in the eighties that the material was organized and the inventories created, leaving, however, the photographic material from the Foreign Propaganda Office of the FAI, in the past and relegated to the back of the shelf.

The Photo Archive of the Foreign Propaganda Office remained practically invisible until 2016 when its materials were organized and its inventory created and made public.

When the war broke out the Foreign Propaganda Office of the FAI was located in the building of the Comité Regional in the old Via Durruti in Barcelona, known then as the casa CNT. From the first weeks of the conflict, the FAI offices had a Graphic Department that prioritised photography as a propaganda weapon. This department sourced and bought photographs from independent reporters, for example, Pérez de Rozas (1893-1954) and Finezas (1889-1957). In addition to accessing these photographs, the FAI also had their own photographers, which included, Polish photographer Margaret Michaelis and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna.

The Propaganda Department changed when Kati Horna arrived in January 1937. Then known as Catalina Polgare, she arrived in an anti-fascist Barcelona with her husband at the time, the Hungarian revolutionary Paul Polgare (1911-1964). Once there she became the official photographer for the anarchists and their photo-agency: The Spanish Photo Agency, better known then as Photo SPA. Thanks to this role, her work was published in international magazines such as the British Weekly Illustrated.

More information: Michael Hoppen Gallery

In July'37 Horna left Vía Durruti in Barcelona to move to Valencia and work as a graphic editor for the magazine Umbral. Seven months of hard work in the Foreign Propaganda Offices culminated in the photo album ¿España? Un libro de imágenes sobre cuentos y calumnias fascistas: el álbum de propaganda antifascista and hundreds of negatives taken with her usual rolleiflex camera. This seminal work allows us to better understand her perspective of, and relationship with, the anarchists.

In mid 1938 Kati Horna travelled to Paris to buy photographic material on a trip she would never return from. She was in Paris for a while with her partner José Horna (1909-1963), from whom she took the surname for which she is now known. The couple decided they could not to return to Spain and instead went into exile in Mexico to start a new life. In their move, Horna had to leave her photo archive behind in Vía Durruti, which my research has now identified, forms a part of the archive of the Foreign Propaganda Office of the CNT-FAI.

A girl during the war by Kati Horna

Kati Horna born Katalin Deutsch Blau was born in Budapest and lived in France, Berlin, Spain, and later was naturalized Mexican. Most of her work was lost during the Spanish Civil War. 

She was also one of the most influential women artists and photographers of her time.

Through her photographs she was able to change the way that people viewed war. One way that Horna was able to do this was through the utilization of a strategy called gendered witnessing. Gendered witnessing consisted of putting a more feminine view on the notion that war was a predominantly masculine thing. 

Horna being a women was able to capture the emotions of women and children of war from a different perspective and angle. This in part made her the legendary war photographer that she later became.

Kati Horna was born in Budapest in 1912 during an unstable sociopolitical period; as a result of the First World War, Budapest suffered severe economic setbacks which continued in the years between the wars. Her father was a banker from the prosperous part of Buda and when he died, photography offered Horna the means to earn a living and the chance to fulfill her political ideals. The surrounding violence, danger and injustice of that time influenced her ideology profoundly.

More information: Time

Horna lived in Berlin as a teenager where she met Bertolt Brecht and was influenced by Bauhaus, Surrealism, and Constructivist Lajos Kassak whose views on photography as an agent of social change aligned with Horna's ideology.

At the age of twenty, Horna became an apprentice in the workshop of a renowned photographer József Pecsi. At this most prestigious school in Budapest, she learned basic photographic techniques. She met Robert Capa -then by the name Endre Friedmann- as a teenager in Budapest, and the two photographers remained friends until Capa's death in 1954.

Through the romantic relationship that Horna and Capa shared, Horna was able to gain great insight into the photographic war world. Some of the wars that Capa himself was able to capture included the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Berneri & Barbieri Funeral (Barcelona, 1937) by K. Horna

Horna and Capa were part of the same left-wing political movement and photographed each other's portraits. When Capa moved to Paris, she followed him in 1933, where she turned her attention to the life she saw around her in the streets and cafés of the French capital.

Her series Reportage dans les Cafés de Paris (1934) captured her brilliant eye for irony and fun. While she did several reportages for the French Agence Photo. Her widely known series Flea Markets (1933) and Reportage dans les Cafes de Paris (1934) are from this period. Besides photographing realistic scenes, she also ventured into more experimental works, closer to Surrealism. Even though Horna gained much popularity with her work, she preferred to stay out of the limelight and work for smaller organizations such as Umbral.

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, she moved to Barcelona, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to document the war as well as record the everyday life of communities on the front lines, such as Aragón, València, Madrid, and Lleida. She photographed elderly women, young children, babies and mothers, and was considered visionary for her choice of subject matter.

She was editor of the magazine Umbral -where she met her future husband, the painter and sculptor José Horna. Kati Horna collaborated with other magazines, most of which were anarchic, such as Tiempos Nuevos, Libre-Studio, Mujeres Libres and Tierra y Libertad. Some of her photos were used as posters for the Republican cause.

More information: Art Blart

With José Horna, Kati escaped to Paris in 1939 with a large collection of negatives that would remain unseen until 1979, when democracy in Spain was reestablished. During the Nazi occupation of France, the couple were married and later sought refuge in Mexico, where she met other artists who were also fleeing war-torn Europe: Remedios Varo, Benjamín Péret, Emeric Chiki Weisz, Edward James, Tina Modotti and Leonora Carrington.

Horna arrived in Mexico in October 1939, at the age of 27. Mexico was, for Kati Horna, her motherland and her patriotism was felt only for this country. She remained in Mexico for the rest of her life and was a contributor to magazines such as Todo (1939), Mapa (1940), Enigma (1941), El arte de cocinar (1944), Seguro Social (1944), among others.

Plaça Catalunya, Barcelona by Kati Horna

Nosotros magazine hired her as a full-time photographer in 1944. There she published series like Títeres en la penitenciaría or portraits of Alfonso Reyes in his library.

In 1958, Horna was the chief photo editor of Mujeres magazine. During the second half of the 20th century she also did sporadic commissions for Revista de la Universidad de México, Mexico This Month, Tiempo, S.nob, Mujer de Hoy, Revista de Revistas, Diseño, Vanidades, Arquitectura, Arquitectos de México, Obras.

She also carried out more experimental projects that bear the imprint of surrealism.

More information: Sothebys

Architecture was another field that Kati Horna explored with interest. She collaborated with various architects like Luis Barragán, Carlos Lazo and Ricardo Legorreta, and documented buildings with historical value in order to provide a register of their conditions.

Horna also published photos of recently inaugurated public buildings, like the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Ciudad Universitaria, Biblioteca Nacional. In 1967, Kati Horna took photos of the Pre-Olympics for architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.

She was also a recognized professor at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the Academia de San Carlos and the Universidad Iberoamericana, between 1958 and 1963. Some of her most well-known works include What Goes in the Basket (1939), La Castañeda (1945), Fetiches (1962), Ode to Necrophilia (1962), Sucedió en Coyoacán (1962), Mujer y Máscara (1963), and Una Noche en el Sanatorio de Muñecas (1963).

Kati Horna died in October 2000. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions in Mexico, Spain, and other countries.

More information: The Guardian

A true photograph need not be explained,
nor can it be contained in words.

Ansel Adams