3rd Photo Street Festival this weekend in Budapest
Free programs of photography on Nagymező Street at the Capa Center and the Mai Manó House from Friday to Saturday this week, April 21-23, 2017.
The 3rd Photo Street Festival in Nagymező Street takes place between April 21 and 23 with 31 exhibitions, 245 artists, 80 programs, guided tours, workshops, discussions, activities for kids, screenings, installations, performances, professional lectures, photo album signings, a photo fair, and concerts.
Held this weekend in the heart of the city, Photo Street Festival engages its audience by presenting all that is related to the art of photography on the pavement of Nagymező Street. It is the street itself that turns into a special exhibition space, where anyone passing by can enjoy the events. The street crossing Andrássy út between Opera and Oktogon is home to the Mai Manó House and the Capa Centre. The former introduces today’s visitors to old photographic processes and techniques, the latter focuses its viewfinder on the present and the future, offering an even on-hand experience of the latest devices and imaging techniques. Moreover, the festival is moving out again into the street showcasing its mini exhibitions and interactive installations in and around shipping containers, giving it an urban-spectacular feeling. The exhibitions will be complemented with open-air screenings, book signings, performances, and guided tours, also in English, thus the Budapest Photo Street Festival is guaranteed to make contemporary photography even more accessible. All day long, with extended opening hours, the two institutions offer a wide range of programs for all ages without admission.
The Capa Center hosts the 35th Hungarian Press Photo exhibit, where visitors can admire the most intriguing images of last year’s local photojournalism and also a very special exhibition of three-time Oscar-winning Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The Writing with Lights retrospective exhibition is a synthetic overview of the artist’s vision and his work in cinematography. On the other side of Nagymező Street, Mai Manó House showcases a selection of postcards and photographs from the collection of William Christian, Jr.. Outside, the containers feature exciting exhibits displaying nude and erotic images from Hungarian private photo collection Fortepan, works of Hungarian photography students, the @everydaybudapest project, and many other exciting art installations.
Photography-enthusiasts will also have the chance to enjoy dance performances of photo associations by DART Theater, concerts of Petruska, Lóci játszik Akusztik, and Speiz Boiz, moreover to party to images of today’s Budapest while dancing at the silent disco to Oltai Kata itunes okj & DJ Suhaid.
Photography became a wide-spread and engaging way of everyday communication: there is hardly any other branch of contemporary culture which is enjoyed and practiced by so many people. Photographs have a very important role to play in our everyday life. We are not only on the receptive side but almost all of us also take innumerable pictures with modern telecommunication equipment every day. Photography as an art, a form of reporting about our world, a source of information as well as an experiment equally belongs to everyday communication. The culture of photography is part of a creative industry, of mass communication, and of modern art. There are no linguistic barriers and photography – due to the quick receptibility – always offers a basic level of understanding, even in the case of the most complicated artistic aspirations. Therefore, it is no coincidence that besides its role in mass communication, photography is radically getting ahead in the field of contemporary fine art as well.
The Photo Street Festival would like to reach many people and explain in an easily intelligible way the occurrences in photography nowadays and the fact that practically everybody can take pictures and actually does at any time. People do so in order to show and share what they like and what they think, they take photos to communicate; however, the public does not realize and understand that photography is a language behaving similarly to spoken language which can be and must be – not only instinctively – practiced, used, and interpreted. Hosting this large-scale visual festival for the third time, the Capa Center and the Mai Manó House aim to help enjoying, interpreting and using photography in a very popular way, and encourage the active involvement of the professionals and the general public.
All events and programs are free at both the Capa Center and the Mai Manó House. In case of bad weather, the events on the stage are to be held inside the Capa Center.
Detailed program: https://capacenter.hu/en/esemenyek/iii-photo-street-festival/