On 4 January 1953, the Observer published this standalone portrait on page one of the paper with the caption: “Fortified by the season’s tips, the dustmen of our boroughs face another year of work which to most other people must seem as disagreeable as it is necessary. The dustmen themselves rarely let it appear that they find the job distasteful, but go about their backyard rounds with a cheerful, boisterous energy.”
This photograph is indicative of one of the strongest motifs in Peto’s work; the dignified and noble working class.
Born in Báta, Hungary, Mihály Petö was the son of a Jewish village shopkeeper. He moved to Budapest in the 1930s where he worked exporting Hungarian arts and crafts, while beginning to build a career as a poet and journalist. Alerted by a family member in London to the Nazi threat, Peto left Hungary for the UK with his wife-to-be, Ilona, and her son just three weeks before the borders closed in the summer of 1939.
During the second world war, Peto was employed as a writer by the British Ministry of Labour and would illustrate his articles with his own photography. With other exiled Hungarians, he planned for a postwar socialist government for his country, not foreseeing the coming domination of the USSR.
Following the war, Peto, knowing that he would best be able to express his creativity and humanity through photography, moved to Paris to study photographic techniques. After returning to London, in 1949 he joined the Observer as a photojournalist. His interest in environmental portraiture allied to the socialist sensibilities he shared with the Observer’s picture editor Mechthild Nawiasky, led to the publication of many of his superb portraits of ordinary people at work and rest.
In the early 1960s Peto parted company with the Observer. He continued to document daily life and social issues across Europe and Asia and also specialised in candid, behind-the-scenes shots from the world of the arts, including sequences with Rudolph Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn and the Beatles. The University of Dundee houses the Peto Collection where you can find more examples of his work.
Following his death on Christmas Day 1970, at the age of 62, Nawiasky wrote in his obituary: “He had such a capacity for seeing life and beauty in people and in places where one had not seen in before…He loved children, gypsies, ballet dancers, circus people, animals, Welsh miners, Indian peasants, music, poetry, beautiful women, the very old, the tender and the shy, the brave and the sad.”
