Andor Ferenc Suba was twelve years old when he received his first camera as a gift from his parents. When he was thirteen, he won his first photographic prize. After graduating from high school, he attended the Budapest Technical University. Suba quickly discovered the limits imposed on a professional in the arts under the Communist dictatorship. But he also found a middle road between true artistic freedom and the artistic methods prescribed by the state. He started work as a graphic artist and a photographic designer. Among his early assignments were promotions by big state-owned companies for products to be sold abroad. In these, he found a new means of expression by mixing graphics and photographs.
In the autumn of 1956, he documented the events unfolding before him on Budapest?s streets. By his own admission, Suba did not originally want to follow the events he saw, but the enthusiasm of the revolutionaries kept him on the streets. He was present in front of Parliament when the protesting crowd was sprayed with bullets.
?What I saw then has been burned into my memory as unending suffering,? Suba recalls.
While on the streets, Suba befriended several journalists from the West, including Folf Gillhausen from the German weekly Stern and Francois Tourtet of Paris Match. Suba?s photos were taken by them and others to be published in newspapers and magazines all around the world.
Hungary?s secret police twice tried to detain Suba, but were unsuccessful. Because of his contacts with the foreign press, he was forced to flee the country, first to Vienna, where he was supported, along with a number of other fleeing artists and intellectuals, by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Source: Múlt-kor
