36th Hungarian Press Photo Exhibition
Open to the public:
2018. 03. 30. – 2018. 05. 19.
Every day 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Closed on public holidays.
Capa Center
Curator: Tamás Szigeti
The exhibition is realized in collaboration with the Budapest Spring Festival.
Anecdote has it that when he heard the machine-like rendition of Für Elise, or the Turkish March, playing softly in the background in a hotel elevator after one of his Budapest concerts (it might have been the one in 1985), Leonard Bernstein said, “There is too much music here.” Knowing that music was everything for him, what could Bernstein, an acclaimed and successful composer, have meant by this remark? Presumably, he felt that the works of great composers such as Beethoven are to be enjoyed under circumstances and in a presentation worthy of their genius, a stipulation which excludes listening to their pieces in a lift that takes us from the ground floor to the sixth.
Maybe it is no coincidence that I remembered this story when organizing the vast number of images selected for the 36th Hungarian Press Photo Exhibition. I did not count them but I could safely say that there are more than 400 pictures on the walls. And thus the question arises: is it too many? You have to keep in mind, though, that we are not talking about pieces of art here but more like pieces of our everyday reality condensed into single images. Moreover, we have already had the opportunity to experience them as many of us watched the events of last year’s World Aquatics Championships documented by the photographs of Tibor Illyés, Tamás Kovács and István Derencsényi. Slices of life.
Many of us may have attended the exhibitions, concerts and circus shows depicted in the photographs of several entrants, including Miklós Teknős, Sándor Csudai and Ádám Urbán, and will recognize characters and important objects connected to them – again, slices of our lives. The same goes for all the press photos taken by photo-reporters who, faithful to the original meaning of their profession, were reporting on the current affairs of far-away lands. We get a sneak peek into the everyday life of a family living in extreme poverty through the photographs taken in Csanytelek by Simon Móricz-Sabján, while the series of Róbert László Bácsi and László Végh offer a glimpse into places that we might never visit ourselves. The pictures of Márton Mónus present us the staff of a crisis car: they help homeless people at night when we are usually asleep. The series Home, sweet home by Orsolya Ajpek, on the other hand, is a great reminder of how interesting it can be to observe our own environment, a microcosm we see every day and take for granted but the small details of which we might fail to notice as we cannot look at it from an outside perspective.
This is the 36th year that the Hungarian Press Photo Exhibition presents the previous year’s most memorable, spectacular or important moments – to jog our memory as well as to give more information about the world around us.
In the light of all this, we can conclude that there are not too many pictures on the walls just as there cannot be too much reality. (Tamás Szigeti)
