Picturing Budapest’s 1956 Uprising

This article focuses on the reception of a series of press photographs documenting the – presumed – assassination of agents of the Hungarian police by armed rebels. Taken during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising by John Sadovy, a photo-reporter from the West, these images became influential political icons during the next two decades in the polarised conflict of the Cold War. They were repurposed and transformed into art on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Drawing from the fields of criticism, photojournalism, visual culture and history, the article examines the mechanisms that allowed these photographs to carry on multiple narratives as they moved back and forth across the Iron Curtain: first launched in the West as a revolutionary icon, then appropriated and controlled as a tool in the propaganda narrative of the regime in the Eastern bloc. The article demonstrates how the power of photography, its impact and influence on public opinion, cannot be understood without observing the image in the historical context in which it manifests itself, in the way it is framed and represented in the media and, finally, in how it is reappropriated by artists

Art · Art history · Cold war · Photography · Political science · Politics · Visual arts · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Law