ZDENKA

Karol Kállay (1926–2012) was unquestionably our best-known and most highly respected photographer, the Karel Gott of photography: a master photographer, a maestro. An artist with a distinctly Western European reach, yet still rooted in an Eastern European terroir; an artist for whom emigration would have meant losing the opportunity – perhaps even the privilege – of seeing and reflecting on the world from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Yet Kállay was not an author in the usual sense of the word. He did not have “his” subjects, themes to which he was devoted throughout his life, as Martinček, for instance, was to the people of old Liptov. He was accomplished in every genre: portraiture, fashion, landscape photography, travel reportage – both at home and abroad. Even his commissioned work was always cultivated and refined. He was an artist you could rely on. Simply put, he was a pro. Perhaps that is also why, when Václav Macek asked me whether I would prepare my own (perhaps generational?) perspective on Kállay for the Month of Photography to mark the maestro’s centenary, I was intrigued. Karol Kállay was a photographer of a cosmopolitan creative spirit and an exceptionally broad range. This is also why, when imagining a possible exhibition, I was more interested in intimacy – in something less familiar, more everyday, amateurish in the best sense of the word. Something that might surprise even a well-informed Kállay audience. With this in mind, we approached the artist’s son Martin, himself a photographer, who knows and oversees his father’s archive. Among the subjects on our list, Martin Kállay immediately crossed out the “family” Kállay – portraits of relatives and, above all, his wife Zdenka. That was the subject that interested me most. Martin therefore went through his father’s archive and selected a collection of portraits of his mother, Zdenka, mostly from the 1950s and early 1960s. I think the collection that began to take shape delighted both of us. These are very beautiful – and, if one may use the word in a professional context, charming – photographs. Not only because we see before us a photogenic young woman with a broad smile, but perhaps also because the pro behind the camera seems to feel something more for her. And we, as viewers, become participants in this affectionate interaction, in this photograph with a qualifier. It is precisely this blurring of genres – between the cultivated portrait of someone close to the photographer and the “product” fashion photograph designed to sell sex appeal – that is the “something” which makes the entire collection unique. Yet we know relatively little about Zdenka, Karol Kállay’s wife. After her husband’s death, she accepted some of his awards on his behalf and gave a handful of interviews to the media, always speaking fondly of her husband and their life together. Karol Kállay, too, devotes several grateful memories to her in his memoirs, Potulky životom (Wanderings Through Life). After the adrenaline of travelling the world to make photographic reportage – even for the German magazine GEO – he would always find a place of rest and understanding with her. We see her here in a few photographs, always smiling. Zdenka and Karol met in 1948 on the set of Čertova stena (The Devil’s Wall), one of the first films of post-war Slovak cinema. He was there as a photographer; Zdenka, a Czech tourist, was there on a trip. They married in Prague in 1950. Zdenka then moved to Slovakia, to Žilina, and learned Slovak very quickly. Then came the children, family life, moving house and making homes, while providing the background and management that a highly active partner required. The couple, and later their children, were very active physically: they went hiking and skiing and travelled down Slovak rivers by raft. They also travelled extensively, and both had a good command of several languages. When things were quieter at home, Zdenka occasionally worked as a tour guide. In one of the few interviews in which she spoke about her life with the photographer Kállay, she said: “I was his lifelong partner, not only in his private life but also in his professional life. I was his muse.” And we might add: yes – a muse, a partner, a wife… someone who made her husband’s fully realised career possible.   Petra Hanáková