Untitled

Born in Budapest, Horna was a deeply cosmopolitan photographer whose work straddles politically engaged photojournalism and Surrealist poetics. In the early 1930s, she left Budapest for Berlin and Paris, honing her skills alongside other avant-garde artists of her generation. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she relocated to Spain, where she documented the war's effect on the lives of ordinary citizens, publishing her photographs in anarchist magazines. In 1938 she fled Spain for Mexico, joining a circle of left-wing artists and intellectuals who cultivated their own idiosyncratic versions of European Surrealism. This photograph of a wax museum display in Mexico City is a perfectly poised study in Surrealist juxtposition. The reflection of a young girl (possibly Horna's daughter) hovers ghostlike in the center of an uncanny scenario devoted to tuberculosis ("La Peste Blanca"), featuring a woman on her deathbed presided over by a swimsuit-clad mannequin gazing into a hand-mirror.