No public transport to photography. In memoriam Mihály Gera

Visiting is free of charge
February 04, 2022 – April 14, 2022
Monday–Saturday: 9am–7pm
Closed on Sunday and on public holidays.
Capa Center – 8F Gallery
Curator: Balázs Zoltán Tóth

The first part of this exhibition is made up of photographs from Mihály Gera’s bequest: pictures that once hung on the walls of his various homes and that formed part of his most intimate surroundings. The diversity of these images, the richness in artistic and thematic approaches all attest to Mihály Gera’s unflinching sense of quality and his boundless interest in almost all aspects of photography. These pictures, mostly received as gifts from friends, out of respect, or in exhange for articles written and opening speeches, slowly turned into a private archive. The “collection,” taken out of its original context of a private space, provides a peek into the past four decades of Hungarian photography.

During a survey of the bequest, comprising more than two hundred photographs, it became apparent that some of them were part of an exhibition held at the Mai Manó House in the early 2000s. The second part of our exhibition commemorates that occasion. But why commemorate an exhibition? Mihály Gera was mostly considered an editor, the dean of Hungarian photo book publishing, a critic, or an influental person holding some important position in the art institution by his contemporaries. His curatorial stance was most probably never mentioned in any interview or discussion, even though he was an avid analyst of the “grammatics” of photo exhibitions: he started out as a technical writer specialized in photography writing exhibition reviews for the magazine Fotóművészet. Though he was very close to curating—the fact that he played an important role in the life of the Art Photo Gallery of Budapest in the 1980s is an obvious example—he never intended to set the thematic or conceptual framework for any of the exhibitions and only took part in the selection of the pictures and in setting their sequence for the installation according to a special organizing principle.

The exhibtion entitled “Variations on a Root of a Willow Tree from 16 Photographers” was the result of what was most probably his only endeavor as an actual curator. The starting point of the exhibition, the dried root of a willow tree, had been found by a close co-creator of his, László Kovács “on the left side of the river Danube, at the 1469th river kilometer.” This piece of wood with its “graceful curves” and “unfinished stubs” later underwent preparation for preservation and Gera invited sixteen photographers and photography students to reformulate visually this seemingly identical object. This exhibition inside the exhibition gives the viewer a chance to identify a long-standing circle of artists still close to Gera in the 2000s, but it also attests to Gera’s constant effort to discover and help new talents, which has led him to enrich Hungarian photography.

Mihály Gera would have turned 90 in October 2021. This exhibition is part of a series of events at the Capa Center of Photography commemorating one of the most important actors in Hungarian photography, “the servant of contemporary photography.”

Balázs Zoltán Tóth
curator

Mihály Gera (Budapest, October 26, 1931–Budapest, May 7, 2014)

Mihály Gera was a multi–award winning journalist and editor specializing in photography, who started publishing his writings on contemporary photography in 1972. His awards include: Mihály Táncsics Award (2009), Golden Pen Life Achievement Award, National Association of Hungarian Journalists (MÚOSZ) (2013), and Rudolf- Balogh Award (2013). Between 1975 and 1989, he was the coeditor of the magazine Fotóművészet. In 1977 he bacame a member of the Association of Hungarian Photographers (Magyar Fotóművészek Szövetsége) as a technical writer. Between 1989 and 1991 he was the editor-in-chief of the monthly technical journal Fotó. Between 1985 and 1991, he was the art director of the Gallery of Art Photography (Fotóművészeti Galéria) in Budapest and of the Photography Section of the Artist-in-Residence Program of Nagybaracska, Hungary (Nagybaracskai Fotográfiai Alkotótelep) from 1982 to 1992. Between 1992 and 1997, he served as the director of the Association of Hungarian Photographers and between 2000 and 2003, as the art director of the Hungarian House of Photography. In 1996, he was awarded the Small Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. He served as editor-in-chief at various publishers: between 1994 and 1996, at the Hungarian publishing house Pelikán, from 1997 to 2003 at the publishing company Interart Stúdió, and from 2004 on, at the small publisher Folpress. For almost two decades, he taught his specifically designed course named “picture reading” to aspiring photojournalists at the György Bálint Journalist Academy. As a columnist writing on photography for various outlets including Magyar Szemle (in his column entitled “Give Me a Picture!”), Új Tükör (“New Mirror-View”), Európa (“European moment”), and the magazines IPM and Sine morbo he was led by the same principle as in his teaching activity: to advance the analysis, understanding, and popularity of images/pictures. The final outlet for his photo analyses was a quarterly magazine called Fotós Szem. After 1990, he edited more than a hundred photo albums, of which a series of thirty volumes entitled Fényképtár (Photo gallery) stands out as an attempt to eliminate “white” spots on the map of Hungarian photography.