KATI HORNA: THE SURREALISM OF WARFARE

Kati Horna (1912-2000) was an avant-garde Hungarian photographer who fled her country in the 1930s to live in Berlin-her contemporaries included Robert Capa and André Kertész. In 1933 she moved to Paris where she was influenced by Surrealist themes using photomontage to create unsettling and uncanny images. This photograph is from her time covering the Spanish Civil War for the Republican side. In the intensity of battle, an eerily disembodied face hovers above the two gunners. Far from depicting an heroic scene, Horna presents the ghost-like figure as a portent of the nearness of death. War at its most surreal.

Following the Spanish Civil War, she moved back to Paris, and then as the Nazis took over, she headed to Mexico where she was a central figure in avant-garde circles. Surrealist Leonora Carrington was a great friend. In Mexico she became a pioneer in photo-journalism, one of the country’s few women to do so at that time. She had an extraordinary career as an editor, photographer and activist, and yet in her lifetime very few of her images were ever credited.

Horna is one of the female photographers featured in my lecture ‘Reframing Photography’s History:Pioneering Female Photographers’.