Kati Horna (1912-2000) was a photographer of the avant-garde. She was a radical leftist who fled war and persecution.
Kati Horna (1912-2000) was a photographer of the avant-garde. She was a radical leftist who fled war and persecution.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Womanica.
This month, we’re highlighting visionaries.
Today we’re talking about a photographer of the avant garde. She was a radical leftist who fled war and persecution. Please welcome Kati Horna.
Kati was born Katalin Deutsch Blau in Budapest on May 19, 1912. She came from a family of Jewish bankers. When she was 19, she left home and moved to Berlin.
Kati sought to make a living for herself, which was unconventional for women at the time. In Berlin, she surrounded herself with artists, writers and other creative thinkers. One of the people in her circle was a Hungarian intellectual named Paul Partos who became her first husband. The pair shared similar leftist political beliefs and frequently socialized with Marxist theoretician Karl Korsch.
As Nazism began to rise in 1933, Kati and Paul fled Berlin, and briefly returned to Budapest.
There, Kati studied photography under the renowned József Pécsi. He was not only a teacher of photography but also a teacher of politics. Under his influence, Kati refined both her radical anarchist beliefs and her photography chops.
After a few months in Hungary, Kati and Paul moved to Paris. Kati was in pursuit of financial independence, and she soon secured magazine commissions for a series of photos about street life in Paris.
Kati drew inspiration from the French flâneurs and captured the everyday life of the city. She was also drawn to flea markets, where she captured dream-like, surrealist scenes. In particular, dolls, masks and mannequins took center stage in her work. The title of her first photo series was Marché aux puces, which translates to Flea Markets.
Kati also explored satire. In 1936, she worked on an anti-fascist photo series titled “Hitler-Ei.” The work reads like a political cartoon -- Hitleris depicted as an egg with a hand-drawn mustache.
The following year, Kati was commissioned by two leftist organizations to cover the Spanish Civil War. She moved to Barcelona in search of understanding how people led their daily lives with a civil war happening around them.
Kati’s war photography was nontraditional. Instead of capturing soldiers, she photographed women, children and workers -- people who were struggling to make ends meet but had to carry on, even in the midst of intense loss. Women’s experience of war was at the heart of her work.
During this period, she and Paul separated. In 1938, Kati married her second husband José Horna, a Spanish painter and sculptor. José was imprisoned in an internment camp and they were narrowly able to secure his escape. Together, Kati and José fled to Paris where they lived in fear of police surveillance.
As World War II broke out, Kati and José moved to Mexico City. Their new home became a hub for other exiled surrealist artists.
Kati lived out the rest of her life in Mexico, and even became a naturalized Mexican citizen. Kati published her conceptual works with numerous publications in Mexico and was a photography editor for Mujeres, a publication devoted to women artists. She worked as an architectural photographer, collaborating with some of the most famous Mexican architects. And she taught photography at Escuela de Diseño en la Universidad Iberoamericana.
Kati died at the age of 87 on October 19, 2000 in Mexico City. Since her death, her work has been exhibited in galleries across Europe, Mexico and the United States.
All month, we’re highlighting artistic visionaries.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!