Portrait of Death

Out of Budapest last week LIFE brought unforgettable pictures that added up to the most eloquent report of Hungary's bloody fight against tyranny. They were the work of a virtual unknown: a gentle, pudgy free-lance photographer named John Sadovy. When LIFE released six of his pictures to the Associated Press, hundreds of newspapers across the U.S. snapped up the chance to run them. Sadovy's grim shots of fury, terror and the face of death were all the more remarkable for the cold cour age he needed to take them in the most dangerous kind of combat--a confused, vengeful rebellion in which the bullets zinged from all directions.

A short, unheroic figure, 31-year-old Photographer Sadovy waded into the thick of the fighting with a pair of old Leicas. used a 35-mm. wide-angle lens at close range for most of his pictures. He leaned over rebels' shoulders to sight his camera along their rifle barrels. Among the casualties in the same action (TIME, Nov. 12): Paris-Match Photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini, whose wounds resulted in his death last week. Yet Sadovy's 18 rolls of 35-mm. film showed no tremor. His most memorable sequence: rebels cutting down security police as they poured out of a Communist headquarters. With his pictures. LIFE ran his own terse, vivid account: "I could see the impact of bullets on a man's clothes . . ."

Tyranny, bloodshed and hardship are no newcomers to Sadovy. Born in Czechoslovakia, he tied his home in 1939 at 14 to avoid German forced-labor camps, later joined a Polish unit of the British Eighth Army. He fought up Italy's Adriatic coast as a company photographer, found that the only way to get good pictures was to stay ahead of the infantry.

Splurge on Swans. After he was demobilized in England in 1948. Sadovy had a thin time trying to work as a photographer. In a grimy London suburb, he managed to survive on two shillings (28-c-) a day during a 15-month period when he earned only -L-1 ($2.80) by selling an animal picture to Photography.

The turning point came in 1951 when he was down to his last two rolls of film.

He splurged them both on a herd of swans preening themselves on a London park lake, made the rounds of London magazines. Two days later. Picture Post telephoned: "The editors want to use your pictures. Will -L-40 be enough?"

Assignments came easier then. In 1953 Sadovy won a Vogue contest for fashion photographers (though he had never taken a fashion picture before). He married an English girl, became a British subject. Last year the Sadovys moved to Paris, set up living quarters in a trailer. When LIFE needed an extra hand in Budapest, Sadovy's knowledge of Czech, Polish and German, plus his excellent shots of Moroccan fighting a year ago, gave him the assignment. The troublesome part of the job in Budapest, he found, was that "the tears kept running down my face and I had to keep wiping them away.''

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