Stefan Lorant: the father of sosias

Well, this was matter of time. I started working on the sosias project after reading Proust's similarity between Odette and Cefora, back in 2005.

Today I just "discovered" (the most subjective verb with pretensions of objectivity) Stefan Lorant. He even has a biopage on Wikipedia. The foremost genius, from Budapest, as it should be: filmmaker, photographer, editor and a man of images.

There is currently an exhibition in Berlin, curated by Udo Kittelmann, focused on Trier, the guy who designed the covers of his magazine called Lilliput, focused on political satyr. It ran for 162 issues, and the largest collection might be Kittelmann's, who has 142.

The first "parallel" or "yuxtaposition" or "photographic jokes" – as he calls them in a generic way, since he coined no name for it – was one of Rockefeller and an old poor woman. Then he started looking for more, as he was starting a new, independent magazine with few resources but a lot of creativity.

The "idea behind the idea" became "to show how stupid pomposity, how silly self-importance is".

Michael Hallett has written his biography, which I want to get right away. He dubbed him the godfather of photojournalism, but the was more than that: he also invented the photographic sosias (pace Lawrence Weschler).