Category Archives: photography

Archival Views of Budapest

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Hero's Square in Budapest, 1939

Hero’s Square in Budapest, 1939

Peeking into the Open Society Archives, there is a fantastic online collection, Fortepan, of amateur Hungarian photography beginning in 1900 and going through 1990. You can search through the years along the timeline, and basic source information is provided where it exists. These glimpses into the past seem all the more fresh because they are amateur photographs. Compare the Hero’s Square above to today’s version, or the current view of Castle Hill from the Chain Bridge.

1945 view toward Castle Hill

1945 view toward Castle Hill

Miklos Gulyas at Mai Mano

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I went to Mai Mano to check out the Vivian Maier show, and the Art Nouveau building itself, but then discovered some recent street photography by Miklos Gulyas in a show upstairs.

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The artist says of the works that:

“When I go out into the streets, I often seem to find that, among other things, common sense is missing most. Poverty and barrenness are not unusual phenomena; as we lived in some sort of ongoing, ridiculous, unnecessary indulgence where, slowly, practicality becomes deviance.”

This critical social viewpoint becomes clear as one sees all the images the flaneur has collected on his walks around Budapest. I especially like the American flag track suit and the Rubik’s cube purse, and all the amalgamation of culture in between, in a style Gulyas calls “caricature-realism.”

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Peter Puklus’s Handbook to the Stars

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Peter Puklus, Handbook to the Stars

Peter Puklus, Handbook to the Stars

Home for the holidays, and finally going through some of the images from the past few months, I came across these installation shots of Hungarian photographer Peter Puklus’s book Handbook to the Stars. I love the way the Hungarian National Gallery presented his work, as part of  its World Models – Studio Experiments and Documents from Kondor to the Present Day exhibition, with the pages and images of multiple books overlapping to create a whole. In front, there was also a bound book that you could flip through, experiencing the placement of images next to each other or partial image in sequence.

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This installation mirrors the structure of the work, and how Puklus presents it on his website as well: eschewing a linear narrative despite the book format, his collection of images were created in the studio and focus on objects in a deceptively simple way. These photographic experiments exploring objectness and light are simple, perhaps poetic, perhaps prosaic, but seemingly concrete representations on an inner world. Rather than creating an artful, artificial arrangement with studio props, Puklus shows the studio world they inhabit. Check out the images themselves on his website.

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