In the final minutes of “Susie’s First Christmas,” the camera shifts to an eight-month-old me, wobbling to a precarious standing position before the full-length hall mirror, baby-fat fingers scrabbling along the slick surface for a purchase. I press my nose and then crush my whole face against the mirror, as if searching for something behind the reflection. What the film hid, I thought as I watched it decades later, was my father. Who was nowhere more absent than in the brief moments when he appeared on-screen, surrounded by the props of his American family, parading an out-of-the-box identity before the camera, splicing himself, frame by frame, into a man whose story had been replaced by an image, an image of anyone and no one.
By then, he was working in a darkroom in the city, commuting to a windowless chamber that would become as thoroughly his domain as our suburban basement. He became a master of photographic development and manipulative techniques: color conversions, montages, composites, and other transmutations of the pre-Photoshop trade. “Trick photography,” he called it. He always smelled of fixer.
My father was particularly skilled at “dodging,” making dark areas look light, and “masking,” concealing unwanted parts of the picture. “The key is control,” he liked to say. “You don’t expose what you don’t want exposed.” In the aquarium murk where he spent his daytime hours, hands plunged in chemical baths, a single red safelight for navigation, he would shade and lighten and manipulate, he would make body parts, buildings, whole landscapes disappear. He had achieved in still photography what he had thought possible only in film. He made the story come out the way he wanted it to.
His talent made him indispensable in certain quarters—most notably in Condé Nast’s art production department. From the ’60s to the ’80s, Condé Nast relied on my father to perform many of the most difficult darkroom alterations for the photography that appeared in its premier magazines, Vogue, Glamour, House & Garden, Vanity Fair, Brides. For years a note that one magazine art director had sent to another hung in my father’s studio: “Send it to Steve Faludi—don’t send it to anyone else!” My father performed his “tricks” on the work of some of the most celebrated fashion photographers of the time—Richard Avedon, Francesco Scavullo, Irving Penn, Bert Stern—at several commercial photo agencies and, later, on his own at his one-man business, Lenscraft Studios, in a garment-district loft previously occupied by fashion photographer Hank Londoner. He also worked his magic on many vintage photographs whose negatives had been lost; he could create a perfect copy from a print. Among the classic images he worked on were those by the preeminent Hungarian photographer (and World War II Jewish refugee), André Kertész. My father’s handiwork “was so precise and close and meticulous, there would be no bleeding of color or light,” Dick Cole, the director of Condé Nast’s art production department in that period, told me many years later, as we sat in his living room in Southern California, leafing through glossy coffee-table books that featured my father’s artifice. “It was amazing. You could never tell what had been changed. You couldn’t tell the original from the copy.”
Occasionally as a small child I would take the commuter train to the city with my father and visit one of the series of Manhattan photo agencies where he worked. He’d lead me to the other side of the partitioned studio, where men perched on high stools before light tables, effacing with fine-tipped brushes the facial imperfections of fashion models. He regarded retouching as the crowning glory of the photographic arts. He would hold up the before-and-after shots of ad copy for me to appreciate. See, she no longer has that unsightly mole! Look, no more wrinkles! He admired the men bent over those light tables, obliterating blemishes. My father rarely involved himself with my educational or professional prospects. But he did, several times, advise me to become a retoucher. Which was peculiar counsel for a daughter who was consumed, from the day she first joined the staff of her grade school newspaper, with exposing flaws, not concealing them. At the heart of our relationship, in the years we didn’t speak and, even more, in the years when we would again, a contest raged between erasure and exposure, between the airbrush and the reporter’s pad, between the master of masking and the apprentice who would unmask him.
Hegyvidék (literally, “mountain-land”), the XIIth district of Budapest, is high in the Buda Hills. Always an exclusive enclave—home to embassies, villas, the residences of the nouveaux riches—its palatial properties were hot investments in post-Communist, new-millennial Budapest. As the broken-English text from one online real estate pitch I read put it, Hegyvidék is “the place where the luxury villas and modern detached houses—as blueblood estates—are ruling their large gardens in the silent milieu.” To reach my father’s address required negotiating several steep inclines and then a series of hair-raising tight turns on increasingly potholed and narrow roads.
“Damn Communists,” my father said, as the Exclusive plunged in and out of craters in the macadam. “They never fix the streets.”
“Weren’t they fifteen years ago?” I said.
“Waaall, they call themselves the ‘Socialists’ now”—she was speaking of the party in power at the time—“but it’s the same thing. A bunch of thieves.”
The camper wheezed up the final precipice and around a tight curve. A house loomed into view, a three-story concrete chalet. It had a peaked roof and stuccoed walls. A security fence ringed the perimeter, with a locked and alarmed gate. A large warning sign featured a snarling, and thankfully nonexistent, German shepherd.
I wasn’t sure whether the bunkered fortress was an expression of my father’s hypervigilance or that of the culture she’d returned to. Later, I read Colin Swatridge’s A Country Full of Aliens, a reminiscence of the British author’s residence in Budapest in the ’90s, and was struck by his remarks on the Hungarian fetish for home protection:
You may peer at the grandiosity of it all—at the grey-brick drive and the cypress trees, and the flight of steps, and the juttings, and the recesses, and the columns and the quoins—but you may do this only through the ironwork of the front gates, under the watchful eyes of a security camera, and of movement-sensitive security lights. It is fascinating, this need to reconcile security and self-display. The house must show its feminine lacy mouldings, its leggy balusters, its delicate attention to detail, its sinuous sweep of steps; yet it must also show its teeth, and muscular locks, and unyielding ironwork. It must be at once coy and assertive, like a hissing peacock—a thing beautiful and ridiculous …
What is, perhaps, characteristically Hungarian about these green-belt houses, these kitsch castles in the Buda Hills and the Pilis Hills, by Lake Balaton and the Bükk, is the conflation of exhibitionism with high security. It is akin to the confusion of the feminine and the masculine that is a feature of the language.
I knew all about that linguistic confusion. It was a staple of my childhood. “Tell your mother I’m waiting for him,” my father would say. Or “Your brother needs to clean up her room.” Hungarians are notorious for mixing up the sexes in English. Magyar has no gendered pronouns.
My