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Both
for her photographic history as well as for her magical and daily
eye with which she captures her images, Kati Horna is one of the most
outstanding characters in the cultural life of Mexico. Born in Hungary,
in 1912, she resided in Mexico City for more than 60 years, from the
end of 1939 until her death in October last year.
In Paris, with her ironic and brilliant character, Kati got into contact with the surrealist group which would reunite in Montparnasse in the Cafe des fleurs. Between 1935 and 1937, with her friend the designer, Wolfgang Burger (a young German refugee, disciple of Max Ernst), she developed a series of comics, characterized by painted vegetables or eggs which criticized the European political situation, and particularly tried to ridicule the figure of Hitler as well as communicating tragedy with a sharp and subtle humor. The atmosphere of rupture and utopia in which Kati lived in Paris contributed to secure her liberal ideology which remained firm for her whole life. During the Spanish Civil War, with the responsibility of making an album for the exterior propaganda of the republic government, Kati Horna moved to Barcelona (1937). The scenes which she picked up in Teruel, Aragón, Valencia and Cataluña, mainly document the war, showing the daily life on the front as well as on the rearguard. Her pictures are basically testimonies of the civil population during the war: a mother breast feeding, a woman bringing food to the battle field, an interior in ruins after the bombings… Despite this abandonment, Kati retains the human part, the ordinary moment, the rest and the truce.
It
was through the magazine Umbral that Kati met her husband, the painter
from Andalusia, José Horna, who was then working (1938) as
the drawer of the Major State of the Republic, until he entered the
Ebro División, covering the escape of the civilians through
the Pyrenees. After a series of emotional and political problems,
and after the defeat of the republican regime, they arrived in Paris
and from there left in exile to Mexico. At 27 years of age, in October
of 1939, Kati arrived in Veracruz and in a relatively short space
of time, the Horna family established themselves in Mexico City. From
the beginning, Kati Horna seemed to sense the key to contemporary
photojournalistic narration. The first graphic report which she published
in Mexico, revealed her intuitive capacity and her experimental eye
in photographic speech. It was a visual story which she had previously
worked on in Paris, and in July of 1939: “Lo que va al cesto”,
appeared as her first collaboration in the magazine Todo. As a premonition
of the times to come, she narrates the collective sentiments of pre-war.
Her photos, poetry books, maps of Europe, passports, coins, peace
dove, friendship symbols and parties were like dirt to go into the
rubbish basket. Razed as would be humanity, culture and geography
for a warlike confrontation. From 1944 she was a full time photographer for the recently launched magazine Nosotros, which appreciated Kati’s excellent photographs and her well managed Rolleiflex. “The European technique of Kati to capture the human side in her photographs has been unbeatable —said a note—. Her exquisite sensitivity immediately captures the sharpness of expressions”, as demonstrated in the portrait series of Alfonso Reyes in his library. At this time she realized two of her most revealing and suggestible studies: Títeres en la Penitenciaría and La Castañeda (both in 1945). With a penetrating vision, Kati Horna transfigures the sordid confinement and achieves the penetration into corrosive and subjective worlds, transformed by her magic eye. She reviews each image with a new interpretation. With a marvelous freedom she recuperates all human integrity, at the same time as tracing emotional, intimate and personal features of the subjects that she photographs. Her lens turns into a mirror which reflects the interior world of the person being photographed. Other
revealing reports were realized for the Revista de la Universidad
de México (where she worked from 1958 and 1964), such as Los
dulces de la Ciudad (1963), whose eloquent pictures highlight the
faulty pumpkins of a road stall, register the look of a few girls
behind the cupboard of the candy store of Celaya, and discover the
sugar skulls and candy covered animals packed in the stalls of the
candy market.
Anita
Brenner opened the door for an opportunity for her to work in the
magazine Mexico This Month, where Kati sporadically worked between
1958 and 1965, showing the art of a few plastic artists such as the
sculptor German Cueto, “The sacred art of Mathias Goeritz”,
“the world upside down” by Pedro Friedeberg, who was then
working as the designer of the magazine, as well as with original
aspects of different characters in the Mexican culture. Her pictures
also showed unknown scenes of life in the capital. Poetic images regained
their forgotten presence in the houses of León Trotsky in Coyoacán
or in the Casa Azul of Frida Kahlo. In her photographs the objects
revive with a marvelous sense of symbolism and dignity. The time of greatest production in the photographic history of Kati Horna was between 1958 and 1972. During this time Kati didn’t let her camera rest for a moment, she took pictures for her job and for pleasure. Her lens discovered the most diverse artists in their homes and studios. The focal point of her images recorded the body movements of the subjects that she photographed and framed the life of these personalities. Her portraits seem to talk through their eyes, their hands and with the pieces of art that they showed. A whole era of culture in Mexico took place around the Gallery of Antonio Souza and Kati Horna was his photographer. By that time, both due to her work and her affective affinities, she became involved in the group of the so-called Mexican avant-guard. Ever since the beginning of the Revista Mujeres, in November of 1958 (until July of 1968), Kati was the manager of the Department of Photography, working on the cultural section and front-covers. During these years she portrayed the most important figures of the sixties. Kati and I coincided in the magazine Mujeres… -says Elena poniatowska-. It was at this time that I first met her, and ever since the start I loved her, because instead of saying “cansancio” for tiredness, she would say “la cansancia”, and I imagined that there was no word more appropriate to make feminine… She would walk though the streets with her camera on her shoulder and her hair loose. She would walk all day... To accompany Kati was a pleasure because in the same way as Leonora, Remedios and Gunther Gerzso were elevated by her conversation… talking to her was real happiness.… In 1962, under the management of Salvador Elizondo and Juan García Ponce, Kati Horna collaborated with a group of friends, whose ideological affinities and desires of revoking the traditional norms of society took them to the founding of the magazine S.nob, a “hebdomadario” which “opened the doors of uniqueness to its readers”. For Kati, the magazine impulsed her imaginary strength and favored the rebirth of fields of work which she had previously experienced in Europe, such as the comics she realized in Paris and the setups she had done in Spain. In the section “Fetiche” Kati Horna published three visual stories: Oda a la necrofilia, Impromptu con arpa and Paraísos artificiales. The unusual emphasis of her pictures, surroundings, visual metaphors and objects which conjugate, give us as a result, chimerical atmospheres full of unreality. The personal focus of Kati, spontaneous and human, captures the substantial aspects of the scene and with her intuition allows transitory things to become eternal and magical, like the woman of the carafe, of the series Paraísos artificiales.
On
the pages of S,nob writers and artists let their imagination run wild,
invented words and comics, made reports and fictionary interviews,
they joked about conventional things in an attempt to decentralize,
amongst other things, art. Despite the fact that the magazine only
lasted six numbers, it impulsed the beginning of another series of
fantastic portraits, which can be considered as the most characterized
stories of Kati: Historia de un vampiro…sucedió en Coyoacán,
Mujer y máscara and Una noche en el sanatorio de muñecas,
where reality serves as the frame for imaginary worlds. The photographic
language of Kati unfolds into a strange reminiscent force, through
which she achieves the transposition of concepts and creates new visions
of reality. Her atmospheres don’t transform the natural state
of things, but within their contexts, emphasize “daily uniqueness”. It is also between 1960 and 1963 that Kati took theatre photographs, mainly of the plays directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, like Sonata de los Espectros (1961) by Strindberg, Penélope (1961) by Leonora Carrington, the ephemeral event Poema inmóvil para un mural de Hierro (1962) and La ópera del orden (1962) by Jodorowsky himself, with the scenery done by Vicente Rojo, Manuel Felguerez, Lilia Carrillo and Alberto Gironella, among others. Thanks to her friendship with Mathias Goeritz, who at the time was managing the Department of Design, Kati Horna became a photography teacher in the Universidad Iberoamericana (1958-64). It was a time of opening and searches. Her students will never forget the passion that Kati felt for photography and for life, her philosophical ideas, professional ethics and her photographic experiences. She then gave classes in the Escuela de Diseño y Artesanías (1965-68) and later, at 61 years of age, Kati Horna continued to teach with an extraordinary strength and vital energy in the photography workshop of the Antigua Academia de San Carlos (from 1973 until her death). Always attentive that each and every one of her students would develop “their own sensitivity to show themselves in images”. Architecture was also a field in which Kati was interested. From her reports in Spain, to her collaborations in S.nob or Diseño, she tried to capture “the uniqueness of architecture”, in her photos, which distinguishes the buildings, the fissures that mark them, the natural language of the walls, their textures and spaces inside. Around the mid-fifties, she did a project for the architect Carlos Lazo, in which she photographed the meeting places of the different faculties, institutes and schools for the memory of the Ciudad Universitaria; she also documented ancient buildings aware of their historic value and their state. Later, in 1964 she recorded the complete process of the elaboration of 12 murals in the new Anthropology and History Museum. Then in 1967 she collaborated with the architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez taking photographs for the Pre-Olympics and also worked with Ricardo Legorreta. Her works appeared in magazines such as Arquitectos de México, Arquitectura ENA, Obras, Arquitectura, Calli, etc.
For more than six decades Kati Horna practiced her occupation working on documental photograph orders and reports for different national publications. Her work as a reporter, photographer and teacher was inexhaustible. Her camera caught the portrait of outstanding personalities and scenes of cultural Mexican life, at the same time as busying herself with other themes, generated by her creative potential, which enabled her to wonder the streets of the city and take “stolen moments” of her work to realize trials, series and propose her own vision, and her fantastic stories. The rich and varied activities that Kati performed reflect her testimonies, photographic series, photomontages and constructed images. A genius, her capacity to give life to objects and recreate unique atmospheres, making daily life the “unforgettable”, characterized her production. The relation that she established between subjectivity and irony enabled her to transcend the implicit documentary vocation in graphic journalism, in order to offer us her personal way of understanding reality. Kati’s talent always resided in her vital force, in her astonishing capacity, in her humor, ethics and her magical perseverance.
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