Mór Erdélyi

(1866–1934)

Mór Erdélyi, 1930. Unknown photographer. Hungarian National Museum

Mór Erdélyi was born on 3 December 1866 in Érsekújvár (today Nové Zámky) as the son of a wealthy merchant. After the impoverishment of his family, he went to Budapest to study photography, spending his apprenticeship with the renowned photographer Ede Ellinger.

He opened his first independent studio at 18 Erzsébet Square in 1891. From the very beginning he was successful and in demand as a portrait photographer. His studio was visited by politicians, aristocrats and scientists. In 1894 he was awarded the title of Court Photographer and the following year he was photographing members of the royal family.

During the millennium celebrations (1896), Erdélyi was present at all major political and social events and his photographs were regularly published in illustrated newspapers. In 1896, he opened his second studio in a tenement building on the corner of Kossuth Lajos Street and Ujvilág (now Semmelweis) Street in the inner city of Pest.

From the second half of the 1890s, he photographed more and more frequently various political and social events, new buildings and historical monuments. In the company of his assistants, he travelled all over Hungary, photographing castles, landscapes and people, as well as a range of ethnographic and architectural landmarks. These pictures were used to publish an album titled “Hungary” in 1909, which contains 680 pictures and has been translated into several languages. He was also a keen observer of the changes taking place in the capital, passionately photographing parts of Budapest condemned to demolition as well as new constructions.

His work was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Exposition (1900).

From the early 1900s Erdélyi sought new ways of using photography. In 1908, he founded the Uránia Educational Teaching Aids Factory for the wholesale production and sale of slides, illustrative pictures and teaching aids, as well as for the production of educational moving photographs. He was the first in Europe to develop a system of projected visual education.

He also played a leading role in the public life of Hungarian photography in Transylvania. In 1926, he was delegated to represent Hungarian photographers at the International Congress of Photographers in Frankfurt.

He also published frequently in professional journals. His writings faithfully summarize the professional views he developed during his career. He considered the primary mission of photography to be the dissemination of knowledge, but he explained that the development of tourism was also due, among other things, to the widespread dissemination of photography.

Mór Erdélyi, an obsessive photographer and business genius, died in 1934. The carefully catalogued photographs and plates from his studio (nearly 150,000 negatives) were largely destroyed and lost. The only surviving works are those that entered public collections during his lifetime.