Black Curtain and Red Light: A Message from the Darkroom
Thoughts on the photographic art of Tamás Katkó
The exhibition presents a selection of the photographer Tamás Katkó's work to date: a summary of his autonomous theatre photography work from the 1980s to the 2010s. The complete oeuvre includes at least 30,000 photographs held in private and museum collections.
Katkó's photographs are set in the theatre but the action could in fact have taken place elsewhere. His images are not mere chronological recordings of the plays’ key scenes but constitute synergistic series of the spectacles’ delicate moves as well as of recognitions of earlier pieces of fine art. The photographs make allusions to classical and modern art history periods as well as tracing the world of photographic experiments of the 1980s. In his work, Katkó evokes iconic artworks and their style that serve as prefigurements or archetypes to some of his impressive photographs. These include Rembrandt's Night Watch in Carmen (Erkel Theatre, 1993), Rubens' Bacchus in Rubens and the Non-Euclidean Women (Pesti Theatre, 2008), light effects reminiscent of the style of Georges de La Tour's paintings in The People of the Wonder Deer (Arvisura Theatre, 1990) or the visual solutions and ideas of contemporary art in The Magic Flute (Miskolc National Theatre, 1995).
His signature style of misty or grainy images are turned into magic by the right exposure of movement and light. Dance, movement and floating textiles tend to dominate the scene almost as in gesture painting. This is partly because Katkó did not use high-end technical equipment at the beginning of his career. His contemporaries used to remark to each other, "Look at how he arrives with a soap dish and what photographs he takes!".
His pictures boast extraordinary effects of colour. His subdued palette often highlights harmonious yellowish, greenish earth tones. At other times, bright red and indigo blue dominate the scene and monochrome shadow plays, soot-coloured silhouette-like figures and fluorescent shapes also make their appearance. As an insider, he can sense and enhance the director's vision of stage lighting so that lighting effects even become compositional elements of his pictures.
His work is closely connected to literature, a major interest of his since he was in high school. His photographs taken of the theatrical adaptations of The Master and Margarita are considered a rarity as they show the action from multiple directorial perspectives with frugal devices and sumptuous visuals.
The first frames show outdoor rehearsals by Tanulmány Theatre Studio from 1984-85 in black and white, where magical dance and the presence of actors dominated the performance. The photographs also depict the afterlife of “motion art” from the 1920s, originally introduced to Hungary and popularized by dance teacher Valéria Dienes (1879 - 1978).
In 1991, Arvisura Theatre, formed from Tanulmány Theatre, in its turn adapted Bulgakov's work that was represented by the photographer via mysteriously luminous scenes. In 1997, the characters of Bulgakov's work came to life once again in the baroque milieu of the Szeged National Theatre.
The exhibition includes a selection of his most distinctive photographs from nearly thirty performances, intellectually underpinned by works, among others, of Imre Madách, Péter Esterházy, Ernő Szép and Béla Balázs, as well as Shakespeare and Mozart. The creative effort is not looking for ways to visually resurrect the play at hand but presents an autonomous photographic reality it creates.
Éva Markovits, curator of the exhibition