Custodial history: All the photographic materials belong to the Kovats Photographic Museum and Studio. The vast majority of the photos represent the work of several generations of photographers from the Kovats family. A small part of the photographic archive consists of images created by collaborators of the Kovats studio and of donations of photographic materials from the local population of Odorheiul Secuiesc.
The first photographic studio in Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc) was founded by Ferenczy Lukács (1850-1926) in 1876. In 1903 Kováts István Sr.(1881-1942) bought the studio from Lukács and in 1906 reopened it under his own name – Kováts Napfényműterem (Kováts Sunlight Studio). It still operates today at the same address. Ferenczy Lukács and Kováts István Sr. were not only photographers, but also amateur historians and ethnographers. They documented with passion and attention for details the life of the small rural communities, mainly of Hungarian and Székely ethnicity, around Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc). Kováts István Sr. was also a photographer in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War, and he was dispatched throughout Europe on the Romanian, Galician and Italian battlefields. He brought back around 400 negatives with images from the trenches, portraits of fellow soldiers, daily life of his company – a personal view of a war that re-shaped Europe and changed the life of millions of its inhabitants, a view that offers to any military historian precious documents. Living for most of his life in Székelyudvarhely, Kováts István Sr. documented everything – social life, architecture, traditions, and his studio was a central point in the life of the city.
Arrangement: The arrangement of the material was roughly established around 1990, when the Studio restarted in full-force, and all the rooms were finally available for photographic work and display. Prior to this, all negatives were stored in large crates and basement rooms at various locations, mostly hidden from communist authorities. However, the arrangement from 1990 meant a simple ordering of the negative boxes on shelves, completely exposed to rooms atmosphere and changing conditions. The EAP1130 project team have now begun work on a new system of arrangement in a purposely dedicated room for the archive, with controlled environment. All the materials are sorted according to their photographic support and a system of registration and inventory introduced.
Basically all the materials had no system of arrangement. The glass-plates were in their original boxes or in diverse open boxes, many of them without any envelope or other form of protection. The majority of the negatives still in the original old photographic boxes hold the inventory numbers assigned by the Kovats photographers, for which registers with name and dates or locations still exist, providing a unique source of information. The albumen prints were stored in boxes and envelopes, and sometimes in plastic bags, with almost no information. Some albumen prints also had dates and inventory numbers on the back. There is also a large quatity of sheet-film negatives, usually found intermingled with the glass-plate negatives. The project team rehoused most of the material and rearranged it according to medium - glass, print, film etc - and chronological framework. A database with details about subject or location, and other info, besides inventory data is also being designed by the project team.
This collection contains the following 11 series.
- EAP1130/1/1: Photographs of People and Places in Harghita and other Romanian Counties [1876-1935]
- EAP1130/1/2: Miscellaneous Photographs of People and Places in Odorheiu Secuiesc [1900-1931]
- EAP1130/1/3: Hospital in Odorheiu Secuiesc [1910-1925]
- EAP1130/1/4: Museums and Churches in Odorheiu Secuiesc [1910-1925]
- EAP1130/1/5: Schools in Odorheiu Secuiesc [1900-1925]
- EAP1130/1/6: Portraits of People in Odorheiu Secuiesc [1900-1930]
- EAP1130/1/7: ID Photos from Odorheiu Secuiesc [1920-1925]
- EAP1130/1/8: Photographs of the Ugron Family [1900-1925]
- EAP1130/1/9: Photographs of the Kováts Family [1893-1942]
- EAP1130/1/10: First World War Photographs [1910-1925]
- EAP1130/1/11: Photographs of flowers [1920-1925].
