Early years Kati Horna was born in 1912 to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire during an unstable sociopolitical period. As a result of the First World War, Budapest - where Horna grew up - suffered severe economic setbacks which continued in the years between the two World Wars. Her father was a banker from the prosperous part of
Buda. When he died, photography offered Horna the means to earn a living and the chance to fulfill her political ideals. At the age of twenty, Horna became an apprentice in the workshop of photographer
József Pecsi. At this prestigious school in Budapest, she learned basic
photographic techniques. While Capa had his lens focused on the action-packed battlefront, the more reserved Kati took compassionate, visionary pictures of those affected by the war, capturing the resilience of women under siege. Capa favored working at the front lines of the war; capturing shots such as
The Falling Soldier [1936]. Horna and Capa were part of the same left-wing political movement and photographed each other's portraits. When Capa moved to Paris, she followed him in 1933, where she turned her attention to the life she saw around her in the streets and cafés of the French capital. Her series for the French
Agence Photo (1934) revealed her keen eye for irony and fun. The series
Flea Markets (1933) and
Reportage dans les Cafés de Paris (1934) are from this period. Besides photographing realistic scenes, she also ventured into more experimental work, closer to
Surrealism. Even though Horna gained much popularity, she preferred to stay out of the limelight and work for smaller organizations such as the magazine
Umbral.
Spanish Civil War In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, she moved to Barcelona and was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo to document the war as well as record everyday life of communities on the front lines, such as in Aragón, Valencia, Madrid, and Lérida. She photographed elderly women, young children, babies and mothers, and was later considered visionary for her choice of subject matter. She was editor of the magazine
Umbral, where she met her later husband
José Horna, a craftsman and sculptor. Some of her photos were used as posters for the Republican cause. Horna also collaborated with other magazines, most of which were of anarchist ideology, such as
Tiempos Nuevos,
Libre-Studio,
Mujeres Libres and
Tierra y Libertad. Her images of scenes from the civil war not only revealed her Republican sympathies, but also gained her almost legendary status.[where?] During the
Nazi occupation of France, Kati and José were married and later sought refuge in Mexico, where she met other artists, who were also fleeing from war-torn Europe:
Remedios Varo, Benjamín Péret,
Emeric "Chiki" Weisz,
Edward James,
Tina Modotti and
Leonora Carrington. Kati Horna and this group of artists in exile became a tight knit circle of friends. The friendship between Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington would later be showcased in the 2010 exhibition S
urreal Friends. Nosotros magazine hired her as a full-time photographer in 1944. There she published series like
Títeres en la penitenciaría [Puppets in the Penitentiary] or portraits of
Alfonso Reyes in his library. In 1958, Horna was the chief photo editor of
Mujeres magazine. During the second half of the 20th century she also did sporadic commissions for the ''
, Mexico This Month, Tiempo, S.nob, Mujer de Hoy, Mujeres: Expresión Femenina, Revista de Revistas, Diseño,
Vanidades, Arquitectura, Arquitectos de México, Obras''. She also carried out more experimental projects that bear the imprint of surrealism. Architecture was another field that Kati Horna explored with interest. She collaborated with various architects like
Luis Barragán, Carlos Lazo and
Ricardo Legorreta, and documented buildings with historical value in order to provide a register of their conditions. Horna also published photos of recently inaugurated public buildings, like the
Museo Nacional de Antropología [National Museum of Anthropology], the
Ciudad Universitaria [University Campus], and the
Biblioteca Nacional [National Library]. In 1967, Kati Horna took photos of the pre-Olympic games for the architect
Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. Horna's interest in architectural photography also expanded into capturing deteriorated and dilapidated buildings. This side of her photography corresponds to her Surrealist connections, as the subjects captured in these pieces allow for multiple interpretations. Between 1958 and the early 1990s, she was also a professor at the
Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, UNAM at the
Academia de San Carlos and the
Universidad Iberoamericana. Some of her most well-known works include
What Goes in the Basket (1939),
La Castañeda (1945),
Fetiches (1962),
Ode to Necrophilia (1962),
Sucedió en Coyoacán (1962),
Mujer y Máscara (1963), and
Una Noche en el Sanatorio de Muñecas (1963). Kati Horna died in October 2000. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions in Mexico, Spain, and other countries. Kati Horna's archive and the copyrights to her work are handled by the Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna in Mexico City. == Legacy ==