CAPAZINE – LET’S STAGE!

Opening on the 30th of September, Tuesday, 6 pm
Venue: Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1065 Budapest, Nagymező utca 8.
Opening speech by Péter PETTENDI SZABÓ photographer, artist, head of photography studies at METU
Curated by Balázs Zoltán TÓTH, Emese MUCSI
Exhibiting artists: Gyula A. KOVÁCS, Tamás CSEKE, Angéla CSÚCS, Fruzsina Klára DANSZKI, Balázs FROMM, Judit GYURICZA-OSVÁTH, Zoltán JANIK, Sabrina KOMÁR, Zsuzsanna LANTOS, Márton MAGÓCSI, Júlia SALAMON, Dorka SZÉKELY, András VIZI
Contributor: Szofi
VARGA
On view:

October 1, 2025 - November 30
Tuesday–Friday: 1 pm – 6 pm
Saturday–Sunday: 10 am – 6 pm
Closed on Mondays and public holidays.

In 2024, the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center organized the annual CAPAZINE workshop for the seventh time, focusing this year on staged photography as its central theme. Within the framework of CAPAZINE – LET’S STAGE, we explored this rich photographic approach, which has its roots in the early days of the medium but was only recognized as a distinct genre in the 1970s. Alongside lectures by leading international and Hungarian experts, selected participants deepened their knowledge of this complex and still-relevant creative practice through studio visits and guided thematic tours. During the nearly year-long program, the participating photographers, visual artists, set designers, actors, and writers (Tamás CSEKE, Angéla CSÚCS, Fruzsina DANSZKI, Balázs FROMM, Zoltán JANIK, Gyula A. KOVÁCS, Sabrina KOMÁR, Zsuzsanna LANTOS, Márton MAGÓCSI, Judit GYURICZA-OSVÁTH, Júlia SALAMON, Dorka SZÉKELY, Szofi VARGA, and András VIZI) developed new photographic projects. The thematic lectures that grounded and inspired these projects offered insight into the theoretical and historical background of staged photography (Balázs Zoltán TÓTH), the ethical challenges of staging and reenactment within photojournalistic practices (Gabriella CSIZEK), and the contemporary variations of this image type (Lucy SOUTTER, Emese MUCSI). Studio visits and artist talks further enriched the program, as artists (Gábor GERHES, Tibor GYENIS), who also work with this approach, shared their methods and studio practices with the participants.

The image type of staged photography fundamentally disrupted the canon of modern photography in the 1970s and 1980s. By disregarding the rules and aesthetic principles that had defined pure, documentary, humanist, and photojournalistic practice, artists who embraced staging as their method dismantled the medial boundaries that had been consistently reinforced since the 1910s. According to theorists who observed and analyzed this process, the principle of ‘anything goes’ became dominant in the toolkit of artists seeking to claim the status of the autonomous image-object. Curator and theorist Michael Köhler regarded one of the most significant outcomes of this shi as the questioning of photography’s very definition as a process that imprints reality into the image. In his view, the mere discovery of an image no longer counts, emphasizing that the modern photographer’s hunter-character was giving way to the artist—creating compositions in the studio or within the stage sets of reality. Leslie Krims, one of the pioneers of staged photography, expressed a similar view of his own approach: “I am not a Historian, I create History. These images are anti-decisive moment. It is possible to create any image one thinks of; this possibility, of course, is contingent on being able to think and create. Thee greatest potential source of photographic imagery is the mind.” Thus, the focus shied from the photographer’s supposedly unique eye, unmatched reflexes, and alert presence to their thoughts. rough staging, the artist can define their medium and—whether concealing or revealing the circumstances of an image’s creation—produce photographs whose source lies not in the ‘outside,’ the endlessly flowing stream of reality, but in the ‘inside:’ the artist’s own world of thoughts, concepts, and visions, long considered unrepresentable in photographic terms. e contributors to CAPAZINE – LET’S STAGE!—photographers, visual artists, set designers, actors, and writers—sought to render this unrepresentable visible, roaming freely across the genres of photography.