Péter Korniss’s pictures are like our childhood photographs, taken when we were of nursery-school and school age, or like photographs of family members in military uniform, proudly displayed beneath the large mirrors in the finely furnished and rarely used sitting rooms of village houses. Portraits of the ramrod-stiff bride and groom, photographs that preserve the most memorable moments of the wedding, familiar to us all, framed by our golden smiles. Posed photographs. And with people aware that they are being photographed. So too the objects, the animals, the trees, the houses, the chairs. This was the first thing that struck my eye at the exhibition. Then, in this magnificent picture-book, I read: “I began taking posed pictures only in the last two years of my project.”
It is strange to see the return of old-fashioned picture-taking, and the festive atmosphere aroused by the miracle of photography. Even friends and acquaintances are apparently thrilled by the sight of the camera on a tripod. Of course, we can say that the earlier pictures are posed photographs as well. Not that the subjects needed to be posed, they just felt the charisma of the born photographer. Even the house of mourning seems to find the right pose by itself, inspired by the compassion and kindness of his gaze. This is how it can come to happen that—as Korniss writes—“The image was determined even before I pressed the shutter.”
What messages did Péter Korniss wish to send with these pictures, and whom did he wish to send them to?
First of all, a good thirty years ago, on the occasion of his first foray into Transylvania, he wanted to send a message from home to home as it were. A native of Kolozsvár (Cluj) himself, he began recording, in photographs, the national costumes and, where possible, the customs of the Hungarian villages in tradition-preserving Transylvanian districts and regions—such as Kalotaszeg and the Mezoýség—for the Hungarian people, for the future. He wished to save what was still salvable of the existing past with the determination of a documentarist.

He began photographing in villages inhabited by Romanians in Máramaros only later. It was by mere chance that he found himself there, on the morning of a send-off for friends called up to the army, but he ended the day as an old friend in the house of one of the conscripts.
Their hospitality drew him back several times. In the beginning he saw only the differences between the two languages and cultures and it was only later that he began to see the similarities, not in their languages of course, but in their everyday lives, even in their gestures. He found it natural to take photographs there too. He had found Bartók’s way. Not only with the realization that people living side by side have more to unite them than to divide them, but also in that—perhaps I am not far wrong to say—his material recorded on location and presented at exhibitions and in books was subjected to the same kind of finishing, and refining leaving the essence untouched, as were folk melodies from the moment of their collection to their final arrangement and adaptation under Bartók’s hands. Thus the completed message, following the pressing of the shutter, owing to the extraordinary character and skills of the photographer, will serve as a message to an ever-growing public.

No doubt there are pieces in this Inventory which do not cut the viewer to the quick as they do us Transylvanians, to whom, even if we do not live in the village where they were taken, they say something quite different than they do to a Hungarian, let alone to a non-Hungarian. Something different, something more bitter. The man in Waiting for the Bus, with a loaf of unwrapped bread under his arm, evokes for us a whole, sad era, because it is we who know his gaze, because the face that he wears is our own, or was our own, and not too long ago. The same thing goes for the Old Man Heading Home in huge wellington boots, with the same loaf of bread under his arm.
For us, at first glance, these photographs are documents rather than anything else, and would probably be the same for those living a hand-to-mouth existence in the third world. But they may be an experience for others, living in more fortunate countries, an aesthetic one if nothing else. The portrait of the Schoolgirl, from Sic (Szék) taken in 1967, with the mullion could be a painting by a Dutch or Flemish master (Vermeer). Also the Romanian Girl from Bixad (Bikszádfürdô), the Attendants and Musicians in a Bridal Procession, and then, by himself, the Musician in his Home.

Mourners. Pilgrims Sleeping in Church. Age-old traditions torn asunder, and through the widening crack sports shoes tramp into the place of boots, T-shirts displaying logos take the place of homespun cambric shirts, a little girl wearing moccasins sitting in the lap of her barefoot, jeans-clad father. From high spirits to the deepest mourning, from subtle irony registering the changes to chaste love, there are so many things, so much light and shadow, such great belief, so much love and so many colours contained in this black and white book! I could list them one by one, and someone more competent than I could write a whole treatise on a single picture, practically any picture. These pictures present the great moments of human life in a world created by man, the same things that all the other arts try to immortalize, the everlasting in the everchanging, the joys and pains of weekdays and red-letter days, the sustaining power of love and affection. And the terror engendered by man as a culmination of his misery.
The Disabled Veteran limping towards the stripped field of maize, as if towards some overpopulated cemetery, could be the counter-symbol to Picasso’s Dove of Peace on this globe of mud sown with
antipersonnel mines.
The wonderful thing is that all the pictures are beautiful in themselves, even if their subject is not, even if they are cheap or kitschy. Not only beautiful but somehow also ceremonious. It is the festive
excitement of photographing, of being photographed, of recording and being recorded for posterity, that elevates and presents even week-days as high days. The province, the provincial is made universal through these pictures.
This may seem a little too full of pathos. Let me try to make it easier to understand.

Péter Korniss’s photographs are elevated by an invisible extra something, the imprint of experienced suffering. This is not identical with the physical and mental fatigue and misery—though it contains that too—that the photographer in all probability had to experience every time he visited Transylvania, especially during the Ceauc¸escu regime. The suffering is that of the artist identifying himself with the object, the subject, the message of his work. And the human sorrow of the moment taken from real life is contained in that imprint of suffering. And perhaps—though this may be anticipating things—the breakdown of naive beliefs is contained in it too. Because we believe that, with our pictures, our poems, our books and music, the world will move ahead on the right path toward better things. And then it does not move. We believe that it is possible to live this way, in undisturbed, unprovokable peace, as people live in these Transylvanian villages, peacefully and together, side by side though speaking a different language, in the beautiful home of the spirit.
These pictures call poems to mind, small wonder since the book is full of
the poetry of images. And there is no need for it to be translated, for the sons and daughters of any nation can understand it. Though they are in Hungarian. In a straightforward Hungarian, conceived in a sublime state of grace.