Ferenc
Berko, a Hungarian-born photographer who was a pioneer in the use of color film
and helped to put Aspen, Colo., prominently on the map, died on March 18 at a
hospital in Aspen where he had lived for half a century. He was 84.
After
capturing faces, places and figures throughout the world and briefly settling
in Chicago, Mr. Berko accepted an invitation in 1949 to visit Aspen, a
crumbling old silver-mining town, to record the transformation that was about
to take place. It was an experience that would change his life.
Aspen's
developers, headed by Walter Paepcke, then president of the Container
Corporation of America, and his wife, Elizabeth, had arranged for Aspen that
summer to host the 200th anniversary celebration of the birth of Germany's
greatest poet, Johann Goethe.
Colorado and
Goethe seemed an unlikely pairing, but the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation
turned out to be a huge success, attracting world-class artists and
intellectuals -- not to mention gobs of publicity.
Mr. Berko
documented the event, capturing the pianist Arthur Rubenstein riding the
chairlift, the playwright Thornton Wilder delivering a lecture, and the medical
missionary and social philosopher Albert Schweitzer in a formal portrait.
These and
other photographs of Aspen appeared in the mass-circulation magazines, Life and
Look, making Mr. Berko a local celebrity. He remained in Aspen until his death.
Critics and
historians of photography have recognized that Mr. Berko was one of the
earliest artists to become aware that color film provided an opportunity to
explore the world in a new way.
Philip
Yenawine, who organized a show of Mr. Berko's work in 1981 at the Aspen Center
for the Visual Arts, wrote that Mr. Berko's innovative use of color was ''not
simply a technical improvement, nor a better way of documenting reality, nor a
way to extend black-and-white photography -- which depends mostly on the play
of light and shadow to produce its imagery; color film allowed the artist a
chance to make pictures the subjects of which was color.''
Mr. Berko
also found expressive new ways to photograph the human figure. One of his
pictures that was exhibited at the Sarah Morthland Gallery in Chelsea in 1997
showed a pedestrian on a city street twisting around to watch a woman fix her
garter. Writing for The New York Times, the critic Vicki Goldberg said the
image was ''so fraught with tension between elements within the frame that the
camera finds it an occasion for rejoicing.''
Ferenc Berko
was born on Jan. 28, 1916, in Nagyvarad, Hungary. His parents died when he was
a child and he was raised in Germany by family friends who were artistically
sophisticated and saw a good deal of Walter Gropius, founder in 1919 of the
Bauhaus, the progressive school of art, architecture and design, and other
Bauhaus regulars. This was Mr. Berko's first exposure to the avant-garde that
was reshaping the art world.
When the
Nazis came to power, Mr. Berko fled to England where he studied with the
photographer Otto Emil Hoppe.
Over the
succeeding years, Mr. Berko lived in Dresden, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Bombay,
Morocco, Mexico, Chicago and finally Aspen.
''I did
everything,'' he recalled in 1978 in an interview with The Aspen Times. ''In
winter, I did ski action things. I took pictures of all the ski classes. I did
portraits, weddings, every function in town I covered and then sold prints.''
During the
off-season at Aspen, Mr. Berko traveled across the United States, doing
commercial work for companies like Samsonite and Pittsburgh Paints, making
portraits that included the official portraits of the United States Secretary
of Transportation and the United States Secretary of Education, and taking
architectural assignments.
Mr. Berko is
survived by his wife, Mirte, and two daughters, Gina Berko and Nora Berko, all
of Aspen.
All images © Berko
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