Born: May 21, 1912 Szeged, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Hungary)
Died: May 30, 1977, Budapest, Hungary
Matriculated: 1931
Locations: Hungary, France, Germany, Denmark
Judit Kárász arrived at the Bauhaus Dessau in spring 1931 at the age of only eighteen, having already spent six months studying photography at L’École de la Photographie in Paris. Born in Szeged in Hungary, Kárász became interested in photography as a teenager. Coming from a country where social photography had gained currency by the mid-1920s, she was to become one of its foremost representatives by the 1930s.
In Dessau, Kárász studied photography with Walter Peterhans after attending the mandatory preliminary course (Vorkurs) with Joost Schmidt and Wassily Kandinsky. She undertook a series of close material studies, through which she also found her preferred photographic angle: the bird’s eye view, taken from high above. In one of the few portraits of Kárász, showing her with an unknown male companion, this view is cannily reversed: the young photographer, sporting androgynous clothing and shortly cropped hair, looks into the camera from above.
One of Kárász’s classmates in both the Vorkurs and the photography class was Irena Blühová, eight years her senior and an experienced communist activist. Blühová and Kárász not only spent their time in class together; Kárász soon joined the KoStuFra (Communist Student Faction), of which Blühová was already a member. The close connection between the two women is evident in several photographs Kárász took of Blühová—some documentary, showing her relaxing in the student dorms and distributing the communist Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), some intimate, close-up portraits.
Kárász’s membership in the KoStuFra was also the reason for her premature departure from Dessau. Caught printing communist material, she was expelled from the school in March 1932 and went to Berlin, where she worked for the press agency Dephot as a laboratory assistant. Meanwhile, she focused her own photographic work on social activism and recorded the lives of society’s poorest. This she did with great success: in August 1933, the Soziofoto exhibition in Budapest dedicated a whole room to her photographs.
With the advent of the Second World War, Kárász had to go into hiding because of her Jewish heritage. She fled to Bornholm in Denmark, where she lived with her lover Hans Henny Jahnn and his family, and returned to a, now communist, Hungary in 1949. There, Kárász spent the rest of her life working as a photographer for the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Budapest. She committed suicide after a cancer diagnosis in May 1977.
Judit Kárász, reconstruction of the dome of the Museum of Applied Arts damaged in the 1956 Revolution, 1958
Judit Kárász, Reading Man (Digger Waiting for Work), 1932