Recontextualizations of press prints from the Spanish Civil War in interwar Hungary

Abstract

My paper focuses on the dissemination of press prints about the Spanish Civil War in interwar Hungary. I raise questions on the spread of visual information on the conflict by the cross-border network of photographic agencies. Thanks to reproducibility, these prints might have been kept in various archives worldwide but with different trajectory even if their versos often hold the same German, French or English captions issued by an agency. As press prints, cut, sometimes retouched and recaptioned, they were once used by the press for different audience and as artefacts of museum collections today, they have been linked to various national and cultural contexts, but with possibly different meanings. Through the cases of recontextualization this paper seeks to elucidate the special in-between position of press prints that are unique objects and reproduced images at the same time. 

Photo: Hungarian National Museum