With the first presentation of Eva Besnyö’s work, Jeu de Paume director Marta Gili continues her series of remarkable women in photographic history. She commented: “if the role of women in the history of photography has become more visible over the past 30 years, it is true also that during this same period of time, the traditional vision of photographic history has changed. No coincidence given the close ties between these two phenomenon.”

According to exhibition curators Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat, Eva Besnyö’s work was built on activism and formal research. Her photography “ranges from the New Vision, the New Objectivity, to social documentary, bordering on poetry and political activism. Which explains why the answer to the question “who is behind the camera” could be, in her case: a woman, Eva Besnyö, convinced that her pictures are capable not only of creating poetic fictions but also, at the same time, to describe reality, a reality that is at once multiple, fleeting, and sensitive.”

This first retrospective, organized by the Das Verborgene Museum of Berlin with the collaboration of Berlinische Galerie and the Jeu de Paume, gathers more than 120 prints and numerous documents. Also featured, a 51-minute 2002 documentary, Eva Bresnyö de Keurcollectie, by Leo Erken.

Like Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, Munkacsi, Capa… and others, Eva Besnyö is part of the avant-garde of Hungarian photographers who fled their country to seek fame abroad. Eva Bresnyö (1910-2003) arrived in Berlin at 20, after having learned photography in Budapest in the studio of acclaimed advertising photographer Jozsef Pésci. In a November 2, 1991 interview held in Amsterdam with Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moorgat, entitled « What I prefer, is telling through photography », she explains her professional choice. “My uncle, who was an excellent musician, told me I had photographic talent. I had a little camera, not great, a Kodak Brownie, and I had taken some nice pictures. He asked if I wouldn’t be interested in learning photography. I said yes, it was tempting. But I didn’t really know what it meant. Of course my parents sent me to the best possible address, József Pécsi.”

In Berlin, she quickly began working with press photographer Peter Weller. She produced visual stories about construction sites, near the Wannsee lake, at the zoo or in the stadiums. Her pictures, published with the studio signature, like that of the young gypsy carrying a violoncello on his back, are now recognized throughout the world.

Her life in fascist Hungary and her political flair contributed to her departure from Berlin for Amsterdam in the fall of 1932. There she found artistic support from Charley Toorop, filmmaker Joris Ivens and designer Gerrit Rietveld. The 1933 exhibition in the Van Liert gallery provided her with recognition, reaffirmed several years later with her architectural photographs that “brought a “new vision” to the functional “new building”.

In the second half of the 1930’s, she became politically committed, for example at the anti-Olympiad exhibition D-O-O-D (De Olympiade onder Diktatur). The following year, she was curator of the international exhibition foto ’37 at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam. The German invasion of May, 1940, forced her, as a Jew, to live in hiding. 
After the war, she was seduced by a world shaped by humanism, “for example, in 1947, I covered a children’s hospital, “Emma”, and took pictures of a consumer cooperative where I visited different places of production…”

Her experience as a mother and a photographer led her to comment “I started as a photographer, covering the Dolle Mina movement, but slowly, I became a Dolle Mina myself, to such an extent that I was no longer able to take pictures, but preferred contributing in the discussions.”

This activity influenced her photography, as she commented herself in this famous 1991 interview: “In the beginning, the form was more important than the content. Slowly but surely that tendency switched, up until the arrival of feminism. Suddenly, the subject took over. Form is essential to me. Composition is important, and I would have disavowed myself had I not taken that into consideration, which was the case for a time. I hope to have found a balance between form and content.”

Bernard PERRINE
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Exhibition
Eva Besnyö 1910-2003: l'image sensible
May 22 – September 23, 2012

Le Jeu de Paume
1 place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
+33 (0)1 47 03 12 50
Tuesday (late opening) : 11am – 9pm
Wednesday to Sunday 11am- 7pm