1442
VERESS, FERENC (1832–1916)
Hungarian photographer
Ferenc Veress, the son of a civil servant reputedly of
noble descent, was born in Kolozsvár, Transylvania,
on 1 September 1832. At the age of 16, in 1848–49, he
was a goldsmith’s apprentice in Nagyenyed to Károly
Budai, one of the fi rst amateur daguerreotypists in
Transylvania.
He reckoned his photographic career all started with
the gift of a camera from his mother in 1850, when he
mostly took talbotypes. From this point his career could
have turned in two directions. He could have either taken
photographs, made experiments similarly to the well-to-
do amateurs of the age or could have chosen photogra-
phy as a profession and taken commercial photographs
in his studio. He took both ways and opened the fi rst
permanent studio of Transylvania in Klausenburg and
never gave up experimenting. The money he earned
from his studio portraits he spent on photographic ex-
periments and his land- and cityscapes.
It was on April 21, 1852, that he contacted Elek Buda,
the local squire who had tried out and modifi ed all the
photographic techniques of the age. Under him, Veress
mastered the daguerreotype, and a year later, opened a
studio in Kolozsvár, the fi rst permanent studio in Tran-
sylvania. He used the wet collodion technique to make
albumen prints of glass negatives. In the same year, he
experimented jointly with count Zsigmond Kornis. The
activity of this promising duo came to a halt in 1854,
when the count died. Baron Károly Apor, who presided
over the Marosvásárhely royal Court of Appeal, intro-
duced him to Count Imre Mikó, a Transylvanian patriot.
The three continued photographic experiments. Mikó
helped him photograph the Transylvanian aristocracy
and he compiled an album of the photographs he took,
no original copy of which has survived.
In 1855, the aristocratic patrons made it possible for
him to go on a tour of study to Munich and Paris where
he visited several famous photo studios. As a result, his
technical knowledge was well above the country’s aver-
age, he could produce life-size portraits which were then
coloured in watercolours or oils by his temporary partner
György Vastagh. He made ferrotypes, pannotypes, but
he could also create photos on leather and canvas. His
cyanotypes have survived. In 1858, he married Josefa
Stein, the daughter of a Kolozsvár publisher, who also
owned the local press, book and stationery shop. The
Veresses had seven children, fi ve of whom survived to
adulthood.
At the end of 1859, he was the fi rst person in Hun-
gary to use Disderi’s 1858 Paris invention, the cartes-
de-visite.
His fi rst landscapes date back to 1859. He used the
dry collodion process, which deviated form the gener-
ally-used wet process in that a cover protected the hu-
midity of the collodion layer for a few weeks, keeping
it ready for use at any time. Count Imre Mikó initiated
and assisted in the establishment of the Transylvanian
Museum Circle in the same year, with Veress as offi cial
photographer. He compiled several albums and series,
such as the album “Kolozsvár in Pictures,” in two vol-
umes, now housed in the Sion Collection of Kolozsvár
University Library. He took his stereo photographs,
featuring fi fty views of the city, at the same time. The
technique he was the fi rst to apply in Hungary, simplifi ed
the tedious tasks of landscape photography associated
with the wet process.
In 1861, Veress built a new studio-cum-home in
Kolozsvár, which was extended seven years later. He
was to work there for 28 years without interruption.
In 1862, he photographed, and sold cartes-de-visite
of the members of the Kolozsvár National Theatre. He
published his call to all the country’s photographers,
who, at that time, numbered roughly 250, in the paper
“Ország Tükre”:Our photographers could do a great service to our home-
land by photographing, and collecting pictures of, lesser
and more important men in the sciences, arts, industry and
trade, and submit their resulting albums to museums...
Our photographers could also do a great service to our
history by taking photographs of all our relics, fortresses,
old castles and country seats, ruinous churches and caves,
which, though still in existence at present, are doomed
to perish within a brief decade.
(Veress, “A fényképezés múltja, jelene, jövöje hazánk-
ban” [The Past, Present and Future of Photography on
Our Country], Ország Tükre [Mirror of Our Country], 9,
1862, 132–133)In 1869, he sent Queen Elisabeth an ornate album with
pictures with the remark: “If only all historic sights of
Hungary could be photographed and... stored in Her
Majesty’s special library, we should be doing future
generations a great service.”
In 1872, Veress took a hundred and fi fty-six 25 ×
30 cm glass negatives of Central Transylvania, and he
exhibited 144 of them at the Vienna World Fair one
year later.
Some of the above albums must have been realized.
One of them belongs to the Vienna Höhere Graphische
Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt. Seventy-eight of his land-
scapes and about the same number of pictures of Kolozs-
vár have survived in family archives, museums and in the
collection of the Hungarian Museum of Photography.
His 1876 exhibition at the National Industry and
Farm Produce Fair was the fi rst to show the technique
of porcelain decorated with photographs and, in 1879,
he exhibited more than three hundred such pictures in
Székesfehérvár and Deés.
In 1880, he published a work of fi ction entitled
“Álomképek” [Pictures in My Dreams], under the