Five trips around the world, 1,250,000 km in the air, 325,000 negatives, 1637 stories. The work of Paul Almásy, who was born in Hungary in 1906, occupies a special position in the history of Hungarian and French photography. As a photojournalist, he visited almost every country in the world, except Mongolia—which became the title of his 1985 French exhibition. His estate is the property of Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, the Berlin-based press photography archive, though many of his works can be found in private and public collections, such as the Hungarian Museum of Photography and the French Nicéphore Niépce Museum. In the spring of 2021, Mai Manó House presents a selection from the Hungarian Museum of Photography’s holdings of works by Paul Almásy.

Paul Almásy did not set out to be a photojournalist. Leaving Budapest, he first studied medicine in Vienna, and then, between 1924–1928, political science in Heidelberg. He started to work for German newspapers in the 1930s, and took his first photos by accident while on one of his assignments. His style of reportage immediately caught the attention of his editors, who went on to task him with complete photo features or complex, illustrated news stories. In 1936 he created two remarkable sets, one in the training camp of the winter olympic games held in Germany, the other in the Sahara, which he was the first photojournalist to cross.

From 1952 he was an official contributor of major international organizations, such as UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO, and FAO. Between 1935 and 1985, he travelled around the world five times, creating numerous photo features in the developing countries of the so-called “Third World,” from Africa through Southeast Asia to Latin America. Like so many of his colleagues, he embraced the principles of humanist photography, with a strong faith in education that made the teaching of children and women a main interest for him. His work came to portray the political, economic, social and cultural history of the world immediately before and after the Second World War. His photo stories called attention to problems in countries across the world, like the situation of women in Africa, racial discrimination, child hunger in Brazil, or the problem of drugs in Southeast Asia.

Rather than an artist, Paul Almásy considered himself a journalist who had two languages to express himself with, treating image and text as two forms of writing. He wanted his photos to communicate information, and thought their aesthetic value was secondary to their factuality. “The photos I always wanted to make were to be good, and not beautiful. What matters for an art photographer is aesthetic quality—for a photojournalist, semantic value.” He wrote several articles and books about the function and workings of photography and press photography, or what he called “informative photography.” It is safe to say the current language of photography would be different without his work.

Paul Almásy’s photojournalistic works have been shown at leading Hungarian arts institutions a number of times: in 1987, Budapest Gallery presented its exhibition, I’ve Been All Over the World, while in 1992 the Hungarian Museum of Photography staged a show, The Witness of the Century. It was on the latter occasion that part of his oeuvre ended up in Hungary. Ernst Museum’s 2001 display, Selected Works by Paul Almásy, featured pieces held at the Berlin Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte.

The changes in the medium of photography that we have witnessed in the 21st-century call for a contemporary reconsideration of Paul Almásy’s art. What opportunities and fields of interpretation open when a photojournalist’s work is exhibited? What message is conveyed to posterity by the pictures of a creator who devoted his whole life to his faith in the truth of images?

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