Hungary in the Heart of Europe

Előszó

For one flying high above,
F. oet Miklos Radnoti wrote about Hungary. For W him this landscape was not a map but a homeland, just as it is for the author of this book, Peter Korniss, who shows the reader a desire to experience Hungary visually.
This guide embraces this small country with unconcealed emotion and affection. A picture always means an emotional identification, although one rarely speaks about it. The identification is as much for the photographer as for the viewer. Painters also first experienced the landscape hiding behind the main subject - a range of hills, a row of trees waving in the background, the sketches of buildings. Then the landscape gradually gained ground and became a main subject. Sometimes a single branch or stunted tree conveys the image of a land or a country in the painter's soul.
Perhaps this has been true since the poet Francesco Petrarca climbed Mount Ventoux, the Hill of Winds near Avignon, on April 25,1336, for no better reason than to enjoy the landscape spread before his eyes and to live it and learn it in a context never experienced from below. At the same time, he came closer to his own inner self by experiencing the view, as he himself wrote to his brother after the excursion. The shepherds and the people of the hill watched the hill-climbing fool and shook their heads - because only a fool would make the climb without the hope of any gain purely to see the view from there. It was a great moment, the birth of the Renaissance. "I was standing there stunned by the great spectacle, sort of going numb in the spell of the unusually light air," wrote Petrarca. There, on the summit, the poet took The Confessions of St. Augustine out of his pocket and flipping through the pages he read "People go to admire the high hills, the waves of the seas, the long, winding rivers and the tracks of the stars, but they hardly ever look into themselves." And then the poet understood that the depiction of one's landscape, environment, country and homeland can renew one's internal spiritual world.
This is how the relationship between the sight preserved
in pictures and the viewer, conveyed by the creator and generating emotions and thoughts, came about.
It was as if the discovery and application of photography in the previous century had broken the spiritual relationship between the creator and his creation, as if the intention of purely conveying facts was intended to replace the artistic creative character. Distributing photographs of cities, villages, settlements and landscapes through postcards became a profitable business. Undoubtedly, in this way the people of far-flung continents were drawn closer together. The spectacle of a theater building, a beverage factory, a city hall, a railway station, a department store, a beach boardwalk or a local cable railway brought them into some shallow acquaintance. We recognized that we are all citizens of the same planet. Naturally, these photographs were based on the principle of unconditional similarity, indicating that what the photographer recorded was what the viewer saw and was true and genuine. This kind of documentation, with its you-are-there immediacy, was coupled with the awakening of a sort of social civic self esteem and critical attitude (photos of war and of society).
There are, however, master photographers who attempt to capture in light the spectacle they wish to present so that it appears not as a subject in the inventory, nor as an attractive travel destination and not even as a document, but as the photographed section of the world selected in its spiritual reality. In its spiritual reality in the sense that a landscape, building or plant can also convey the metaphysical, spiritual essence of the experience provided by it - consider the trees of Altdorfer or van Gogh - but primarily in the sense that, by his creation, the artist can provide a cathartic experience tran-scendentally valid and true beyond the direct reality and authenticity of the image.
Péter Korniss's pictures of Hungary bring to the viewer the soul of a country, the spiritual essence of a homeland. The affection towards the homeland is perceptible, but so is the joy of the discovered and created beauty. Discovered Vissza