The Secret Language: Images and Notes on the Psychoanalytical Aspects of the ‘Creative’ use of Photography in the Seventies

In this paper I explore the psychoanalytic background of creative photography in the second public sphere of socialist Hungary. Photography theory informed by Peirce’s semiotics and psychoanalytical concepts, permeated the European and Transatlantic art discourse of the seventies, associated with Walter Benjamin’s medium theory, which was developed in the thirties. In his seminal texts on photography and technical reproduction Benjamin introduces the concept of optical unconscious , and instead of the artist’s signature he draws our attention to the porous nature of lens based media letting the uncontrollable reality seep into picturing; he appreciates the unique and magical quality not of the photographer, but her/his subject. While in the Western art scenes Benjamin’s insights were intertwined with the Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge (critique of discourses), on the other side of the Iron Curtain underground artists preferring the medium of photography stepped into the Benjaminian path by „inventing” the performative camera and re-loading the montage tradition. The protagonist of this study is Gusztáv Hámos and his photographic works from the 1970s, re-considered and further developed in the context of his photographic films made in collaboration with Katja Pratschke from the aughts. Hámos made pictures align with his systematized and conceptualized photo-process, that he combined with acute social research (collaborating with sociologists), and developed in his private sphere in a peformative way involving „rebellious” artist friends. State control contributed to the development of the interdisciplinary and intermedial approach featuring in Eastern Block. The „amateur professional” in the squeeze of prohibitions was forced to discover uncharted territories, and the bricoleur – as the psychologist Ferenc Mérei called himself – would become the inventor of private circles freedom. A significant theme of this article is the so called „montage-debate”. Montage was manifested as an interdisciplinary issue, a hub in Hungarian „broken” discourses. Thinking on montage created a space to exchange ideas between psychologists, communication theorists and artists, allowed the outlawed psychoanalysis to re-emerge thanks partly to Lacan’s semiotic understanding of Freudian terms. Research into the Hungarian tradition of photomontage shows that montage is not only a historical device of image criticism, but a creative process backed with deep-psychological awareness; i.e. psychoanalysis can be seen as a secret knowledge, a formative language that permeated the second public sphere, and the subversive use of photography.