„Homo mensura”

Abstract

At the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, two major exhibitions presented the university library’s most beautiful photographs from the 19th century (and early 20th century) and their historical-artistic context (Photo/model. Images between Art and Nature and Photo/model 2. Memories of Forgetting; curator: Miklós Peternák). Students from the University's Doctoral School created works in response to the photographs, so contemporary works were also exhibited. For the first exhibition in 2016, I created an interactive installation entitled Human Height, which allowed certain photographs (or more precisely their reproductions) to become a form of comparison in a different way from the usual approach. This paper presents this installation’s background, from the selection of the photographs used for the work to a brief analysis of the documentary shots taken in the exhibition space.
Reproduction of an artwork is a kind of image that can be used to create abstract parallels, so that different works can be juxtaposed which might be difficult to see together in their original form. László Moholy-Nagy rejected the idea of decorative images as room ornaments, and instead wrote of reproductions that can be used for various purposes and can play an important role as part of a thought process. Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin and André Malraux thought in a similar way about reproducible images, and Aby M. Warburg used photographs of artworks to illustrate complex formal-content relationships for his Mnemosyne Atlas. Today, we live in the age of virtual image databases, of digital pixel-based reproductions, where images can be organized using complex programs and even machine learning algorithms. But we still sometimes need to understand relationships through physically tangible photographs, whether they are ’original’ photographs or reproductions on paper.

Photo: Photographed by the Author