The role that visual artist and musician Csaba Koncz could most completely identify with was that of the eternal outsider, and this informed both his presence in the different arts and his status in society. However, being an outsider did not prevent him from influencing and shaping the field he engaged with at any one time. The short period between 1962 and 1967, when he devoted his attention to photography, became an indelibly important period in the history of Hungarian neo-avant-garde photography. The experimental, abstract, symbolic photographs he made during this period were part of a polemic and discourse that spilled out of the exhibition spaces and underground table societies, and reached, via the photographic press, the strait-laced cultural policy-makers of the time.
He created his first photo series in the Roma ghetto of Bőszénfa, but he was not particularly interested in social documentary photography or photojournalism. He soon turned to abstract imagery, which required very precise planning and execution from a photographer. He photographed pieces of wires and metal objects found in scrapyards, creating images that look like ink calligraphy: springs, links of chain, screws, cramp-irons and whimsically bending wire meshes appear before austere, snow-white backgrounds. He placed the heavy metal objects and the abstract constructions he composed of them on a sheet of glass and photographed them from below, stripping them of their real function and context. Another way to create a neutral background was to photograph the subjects—large agricultural tools like a harrow or a plough—in snow. His floating motifs are the spiritual and intellectual kin of Dezső Korniss’s anthropomorphic creatures from the 1940s and Jackson Pollock’s calligraphic works.
Csaba Koncz played an important, if episodic, role in the underground culture of Hungary in the 1960s. He rejected socialism as it came to be with his whole lifestyle, living without a permanent job or abode, just as his art, the way he presented it to the audience and his community actions went against the canon of socialist realism and its established norms. As a member of the beat generation, he was most attracted to music, art and information that was associated with ‘Western’ culture. After he left Hungary, he lived in a Dutch commune, was busking in France and released a folk rock record with Pan Ra, and travelled far and wide in India before he returned to his native country in 1992, settling in Balatonhenye, where he died in 2022. He moved freely between the different forms of expression, being a photographer, sculptor, poet and musician at the same time—a universal creator who lived his life as a work of art.
Katalin Kopin