Appointed photographer to the imperial and royal court in 1885, Manó Mai (1855–1917), who also wrote extensively on the art form, was admired as one of the best Hungarian makers of children’s portraits. He assumed a comprehensive attitude to photography, not restricting himself to its commercial side. He studied the position and development of photography in its full context, and as an author, editor, organizer and public figure, he sought to further its social recognition. He was one of the initiators of the National Alliance of Hungarian Photographers, and in 1906 he was the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal A Fény (Light).

Along with photos of individuals and families, he took a great many children’s portraits in his studio, though reportage-style shots taken at other locations have also survived (such as the funeral of Lajos Kossuth, 1894). His award-winning portraits of adults and children may make an ambivalent impression on today’s viewer. The technical perfection of his images and the elegance of the posings will probably invite praise, respect and a degree of jealousy, while the stylish requisites of middle-class life in a prosperous bygone era may prompt nostalgia, yet our notion of honest portrayal is markedly different. Rather than trustworthy characterization, the portraitist of the turn of the century complied with the—usually fallacious—idealistic image his client held of themselves. Lavish settings, postures that had nothing to do with the model’s character and excessive retouching were all part and parcel of studio photography at the time. From the 1860s till the end of the century, there were very few portraitists—and Manó Mai was not one of them—who did not choose to deliver what clients wanted.

Writer Péter Nádas, himself a photographer by training, is well acquainted with this phenomenon and its background, as he aptly described the situation in his introductory essay to the book, Mai Manó fotográfiái (The Photography of Manó Mai).

‘In Mai Manó’s studio photos, the emerging modern individual stands before us with a lively and very intimate gaze. This individual is quite vain, and likes not only wealth and luxury, but even their semblance. Manó Mai, however, not only serves his client’s vanity and illusions, but also documents them. ... And it must be inevitable that in this both realistic and idealistic process of the age, every individual and every family should want to seem to be a little more than their situation otherwise permitted. Manó Mai took his pictures on special days of human life, the day of the first communions or the bar mitzvah, engagements, weddings and baptisms. He captured a single moment of the big day, and the spirit in which he did so was not of the quotidian but of representation and ambition.’

The models of Manó Mai’s surviving portraits include prominent figures of the period as well, such as politicians, artists, aristocrats, Habsburg archdukes, Emperor Franz Joseph, MP and President of the Independence Party Ferenc Kossuth, Budapest Mayor István Batthyány, Minister of Transport Gábor Baross, and Count István Batthyány, the friend of the famous patriot and horse breeder, Széchenyi. Of the artists, he photographed a young Béla Bartók, and Tibor Csörgeő, the renowned amateur photographer, when he was still a child.

‘... Mai and Co. has a first-rate reputation, of which there is no better proof than the studio’s steady, large and very distinguished clientele, which continues to grow day by day. Mai has become a household name in photography,’ wrote Pesti Hírlap on 25 December 1912. That changed rapidly, however, and for a long time, Manó Mai’s name was to sound familiar for a few professionals only—until the late 1990s, that is, when his former studio opened to the public as a gallery. In 2024, Mai Manó House celebrates its 130th birthday.

The 50 photographs on view in PaperLab Gallery are a selection from the works photographer Manó Mai made in his Budapest studios around the turn of the century.