Capa Grand Prize Hungary 2018 – Appreciation of the jury
Lars Boering
Managing Director of World Press Photo
The jury of last year has chosen the three candidates well and the progress they had made was very clearly visible. The presentations they did and the work they showed also revealed the ongoing challenges of long term projects: do they need to continue working on or have they finalised their project? Am I to involved or do I need to dig deeper?
The photographers were successful in giving the jury a lot to debate and to force us to weigh all the elements that were part of the projects. If you look at it in that way we can definitely say that they have all succeeded. In the end there is only one that receives the prize and the winner should fulfil the promise of a being a worthy one that will keep us amazed by the project. I’m convinced this will happen.
Louise Fedotov-Clements
Artistic Director of QUAD & Director of FORMAT International Photography Festival
The Capa Grand Prize Hungary fellowships and awards offer a special opportunity to recognize outstanding individuals working with photography with connection to Hungary. It was fascinating to see the range of ideas and approaches in the submissions exploring multiple subjects from long-form personally engaged documentary to wider cultural, economic and political concerns through to conceptually driven series.
As with most jury processes it is a challenge to view the work online, to appreciate the depth and nuance of ideas and intention. However our judging process allowed for discussions and debate, to read, think and revisit all of the submissions. We understand that for every artist their work is genuinely very important and we encourage all artists at every stage of development to apply for opportunities such as this one, to keep going with their work and to have or continue to develop the confidence to find their own voice and strategies to communicate visually.
The Fellows, Grand Prize Winner and the shortlisted artists have all demonstrated exceptional points of view in coherent projects redeveloped over a number of years. Religion, economics, personal lives, poverty, history, conflict, memory and change are all considerable subjects that have been explored in detail within the works. We have great anticipation for the next stages of progress for the projects of the new fellows which include; ‘Life of Sophie’ by Hajdú D. András, which shares an intimate portrait of the lives and members of a family and one young girl in particular, living in very hard circumstances in rural Hungary; ‘Orthodoxia’ by Bánhegyesy Antal, which looks at the rapid development and contradictions of religion and identity in Romania; and ‘The Missing Stories of Hungary’s Last Survivors’ by Hermann Ildi, a living breathing history in relation to the Jewish holocaust, which consists of important documentation and first hand accounts from individuals who are now living in Hungary and the USA.
We would also like to point out that all of the finalists that we have selected have shown us the richness that is made possible by going in deep rather than wide. Which leads me to refer to a poem that I think of often which connects us together in our common challenges, especially photography:
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first thing
close in,
the step you don’t want to take.
Start with the ground that you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own way of starting
the conversation.
Start with your own question,
give up on other people’s questions,
don’t let them smother something simple.
To find another’s voice,
follow your own voice,
wait until that voice
becomes a private ear listening
to another.
Start right now
take a small step you can call your own
don’t follow someone else’s heroics,
be humble and focused,
start close in, don’t mistake
that other for your own.
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first thing
close in,
the step you don’t want to take.
by David Whyte
Oliva Maria Rubio
Curator and Artistic Director of La Fábrica
Concerning the whole process of the Capa Grand Prize Hungary I find it very smart. It gives the fellowships the chance of working during a year on their projects having the help of the tutors. Beside that, the idea of having two different juries gives the fellowships the possibility to let their work known to more professionals coming from differents countries and backgrounds.
The progress of the previous year projects is obvious. we can see how they have gone depth on their knowledge of the topics, developped them and present them in dummies and the exhibition.
I have been very impressed by the sensitivity of the participants of this year towards the problems of our present. Social, political and the recent history of Hungary are the focus of many of them.
I find very important not only the problems or questions that the authors ask themselves but also the ones that they raise to us. Sometimes the topics can be problematic as they have many differents ways of approching them and to be received by the public.