Cleaning (1920-as évek vége)

Imre Kinszki's Jewish background and financial difficulties forced him to abandon his studies and take office. He worked in the archives of the National Association of Hungarian Textile Manufacturers for the rest of his life. He first picked up a camera relatively late in life, when his wife gave him one as a present from her first child in 1926, according to family memories. As well as documenting the growing up of his son and then his daughter, he soon became increasingly passionate about new subjects and photographic solutions. In 1931 he became a member of the National Association of Hungarian Amateur Photographers (MAOSZ). By the 1930s, he was an established figure in amateur photography circles. In an article from 1934, he had already expressed his strong preference for the so-called 'New Objectivity' (as opposed to the 'Hungarian style'). His extensive contacts abroad enabled him to become acquainted with the latest German photographic trends. In December 1938, he and several of his fellow photographers left the MAOSZ because he disagreed with the association's leaders on issues of ideology and artistic outlook. In January 1937, Jenő Denkstein, Mihály Eke, Dr. László Félegyházy, Ferenc Haár, Gyula Haidberg, Dr. Miklós Müller, Gusztáv Seiden, Lajos Szabó, Ernő Vadas and Imre Kinszki founded the Modern Hungarian Photographers Group. Imre Kinszki's active organizational work in the group for almost three years played an important role in his life and public life. There is no data on how much he photographed during this period, but it is likely that the hundreds of (mostly undated) positives and negatives that survive date from the period before that, the late 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. He has been widely featured in international exhibitions, anthologies and various press products (National Geographic, American Photography). Kinszki died in 1945 in a death march, somewhere on the way to Sachsenhausen. His wife and daughter survived the Holocaust in the ghetto of Pest. Among the few belongings they took with them was a box of negatives, which Kinszki, who was on his way to his last call-up for conscription, entrusted to them as a must-have in the hope of a new start after his difficult time. Most of the few hundred remaining shots have found their way to public collections, and some of the original enlargements are circulating on the international art market at increasingly high prices. 

One of Kinszki's favourite subjects was the photography of plants and small creatures. It was a family tradition that he was interested in botany,  observing a single animal or plant for a long time, even years. For example, he wrote a detailed account of the wreathed elf or the habits of the chachiko in the pages of the Búvár magazine. Another group of themes in his photographs may have developed in connection with the official agenda: details of the urban landscape and small scenes of city life. In the early afternoon, after closing the last file, Kinszki's 'second shift' began: walking around the city, camera in hand, scanning the visual challenges of the city. His photographic legacy clearly reveals the narrow geographical boundaries of this exploratory journey, the Danube bank, the streets of Erzsébetváros on the way home, and most often the narrower landscape of zugló, the area around Róna Street and the nearby Rákos stream. He wanted to capture everything that only a human could see. Besides microscopic images, his favourite setting was the so-called "window perspective". The radical top view was one of the liberating achievements of photography in the 1920s and 1930s. It was one of the tools of the renewal of the photographic language. It was known as "Neues Lehen" or "straight photography", or "Neue Sachlichkeit" and "Bauhaus Fotografie". The search for texture, the rhythm of regular repetition, also became a theme of the new photography. Kinszki's photographs are many of these. He produced a series of very beautiful shots that associate the texture of fabrics. The influence of Rodchenko, Moholy-Nagy or Renger-Patzsch can be recognised in his work. True, mostly in a gentler, more restrained, idyllic approach, as if the avant-garde and the Biedermeier could be combined in one creative habitus. 

The image Cleaning can be classified both as a socio- and as a Neue Sachlichkeit-photograph. Yet in favour of the latter is the fact that we do not see the face of the cleaner in the picture, only his shadow and the activity he is engaged in. Here again, Kinszki composes the everyday subject from a top view, from an oblique camera angle, with tilted planes, with the previously erroneous short cuts, with the extended shadows that fill most of the picture space, or with the disturbingly flickering light-shadow drawings. The photograph, made around the late 1920s, comes from the heritage of Budapest photographer Imre Kinszki. The back of the vintage photo was marked with a stamp by the artist.