Judit Kárász

Judit Kárász was born in Szeged (then Austria-Hungary, now Hungary) on 21 May 1912, and grew up in Budapest, among other places. She became interested in photography at a young age and began a six-month programme of study at Paris’s École de la Photographie in 1930. In 1931 Kárász came to the Bauhaus Dessau, where she studied in Walter Peterhans’s photography class. She was close friends with Irena Blühová and created multiple portraits of her. The two of them were politically active in the Communist Student Faction, the so-called “Kostufra”. In 1932 Kárász had to leave the Bauhaus after she was discovered printing communist material. She went to Berlin and worked as a lab assistant at the DEPHOT photo agency until 1935. As a photographer, she documented the lives of the lower classes and workers in the capital as well as in photojournalistic images from her travels across Germany and Hungary. In 1933 the exhibition “Socio-Photo” in Budapest dedicated an entire room to her work. As a Jewish and leftist social-documentary photographer, Kárász fled from the Nazis to the Danish island of Bornholm in 1935. In order to receive Danish citizenship, she entered a marriage of convenience with the painter Hans Helving in 1939. In 1949 her political convictions led her to return to communist Hungary, where she worked as an object photographer for the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. After being diagnosed with cancer, Judit Kárász took her own life in Budapest on 30 May 1977.