The History of Photography on Stamps

The Hungarian Museum of Photography has a small but special collection within its vast holdings. Not photographs. Stamps that flash up one exciting aspect after another from the history of photography. Including some that we can no longer even imagine today, when digital photography is one of our most everyday experiences.

Thanks to the 2017 cooperation between Tripont and the Museum of Photography, this photography-themed stamp collection now also exists in digital form, on photographs of such quality that even the change in printing technology can be followed on them. But since this interesting collection has come into our hands, we cannot resist showing a few pieces from it. Here comes the short history of photography – in stamp pictures!

1989: 150 Years of Photography

This 1989 XXX stamp celebrates the round anniversary of the invention of photography. It was in 1839 that J. N. Niépce's and L. Daguerre's invention, the daguerreotype, was announced at the French Academy, and the details of the process were then presented at a session of the Academy. Naturally there was plenty of precedent – and competitors too. A record of image formation with a pinhole camera was already made around AD 900, and a German chemist named J. H. Schulze realised in the early 1700s that silver salts are light-sensitive. In the early 1800s several people solved the problem of how to fix the image projected inside the camera obscura. And W. H. F. Talbot presented his own process – which took a technically different route – the talbotype, before the British Royal Society as early as January 1839, but because of patent restrictions it could not spread. Just as we hardly remember Niépce's name either, although the development of the daguerreotype was mostly his work, not Daguerre's.

1898: 1st Amateur Photography Exhibition in Nuremberg

Exhibitions play an important role in the history of photography; they introduced the interested public to the work of photographers and presented the latest products of companies dealing with optical instruments and chemicals. Prizes for outstanding achievement were also awarded at the exhibitions. Until 1915 the symbols of these prizes could often be seen on the backs of photographs or on the letterheads of the companies concerned. But who took photographs in the first decades? At first many artists gave their last penny for a camera, hoping to make a better living from portrait photography than from painting. And by the mid-1850s the first photographic societies had been formed, where photographers and those interested in the new branch of art exchanged information about new technical solutions and about the works of other photographers. This was when the first specialist magazines were founded too.

2013: 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Robert Capa

This stamp, issued in 2013, was made for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Endre Ernő Friedmann, alias Robert Capa. Robert Capa was one of the most daring and most consciously self-constructed photographers in Hungarian photography, who, for all his myth-building, really did put his skin on the line in the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, China and Vietnam. As a war correspondent he held to the principle that “if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough”. Like many of his contemporaries, he made his career not in Hungary. In 1931 he moved to Germany, since because of his left-wing political activity it was better for him to leave the country. In 1939, following his mother and younger brother, he emigrated to America. His pictures grip the viewer not only with their documentary value but with their strong emotional impact. According to John Steinbeck, “Capa knew how to look and knew how to make use of what he discovered. In the face of a child he could depict the hatred of a whole people.” He lost his life in Indochina in 1954 – he stepped on a mine.

1916: War Photography Exhibition in Budapest

During the First World War, attempts were made to reduce the losses affecting numerous families through public donations as well. One common way of giving to charity for the benefit of the widows and orphans of fallen soldiers was the organisation of war exhibitions. At the war exhibition on Margaret Island, for example, the general public could view souvenirs and weapons brought home from the front, and the entrance tickets and souvenirs supported war-affected people in Transylvania. There was also a military aircraft exhibition. At the National Salon (Nemzeti Szalon), photographs taken at the front, and of soldiers, could be viewed. Those on the home front could thus form an idea of the direct experience of the war – even if not in its entirety, because the exhibitions also served propaganda purposes.

1909/1910: Ernemann Camera

The Dresden company Ernemann began producing photographic equipment in 1889, and from 1890 in full steam – literally, as it was then that the factory was fitted with steam engines. In the first decade it produced only the wooden parts of wooden cameras, but by the early 20th century it produced all the other components too, and even dealt with projectors for cinema films. It also discovered amateur photographers as a target audience. During the First World War it made a machine-gun camera. Soldiers also showed great interest in compact cameras that could be slipped into a pocket, and many took a camera with them to the front. The great German inflation after the war also came in handy for Ernemann, since it could export its products at low prices. Its legendary camera was the Er-Nox/Ermanox, with which, thanks to its fast, large lens, it was possible to take photographs even in dimly lit places. In 1926 the company merged with two other companies, thus creating Zeiss Ikon.

1950: Photokina

The major international photographic fair, Photokina, was first held in 1950 in Cologne, at the initiative of the German Photographic Association. Since 1966 the fair has welcomed photography lovers at regular two-year intervals. At first it was an event open to everyone, then between 1974 and 1988 it was narrowed to a trade fair, which brought a serious drop in attendance but began to attract professional photographers and the companies concerned from abroad as well. Today the fair runs under the slogan “World of Imaging” and is accompanied by popular side programmes: workshops, exhibitions, photo shoots. In 1988 the world's longest photographic exhibition, 1,300 metres long, could be seen here.

1999: The Great Figures of Photography

By 1999, when this series of stamps was issued, photography had been shaping humanity's way of seeing for more than 150 years. Even so, it is the photographers of the first few decades of the 20th century who exerted an influence on art photography that can still be felt today. This series presents them. Nadar was a characteristic experimenting figure of the heroic age of the 19th century, who, beyond the archaic photographic techniques, was among the first to discover electric lighting and ballooning. Eugène Atget photographed the buildings and streets of Paris in the early 20th century with a technique then already considered old-fashioned. The influence of his lyrical documentarism still echoes in street photography and urban photography. Jacques-Henri Lartigue began photographing as a child, naively but with great devotion; his irregular, dynamic pictures became known in the middle of the century, incidentally with strong curatorial editing. Henri Cartier-Bresson depicted banal trivialities with such deep humanism and perfect editing that they acquired serious weight, while Brassaï descended into the still shabbier, still more vulnerable strata of Parisian life.

Author: Boglárka Cziglényi