One-third of the total amount has already been raised through a community fundraising campaign for a photo book on Hungarian society, but support is still needed to preserve an independent photographic record of our society today.
Nine outstanding photographers from the renowned Pictorial Collective photographic association have traveled thousands of kilometers to collect the 200 photos that will now be included in a book to be published as a time capsule, so that they can be taken out in ten, twenty, or fifty years’ time and anyone can still remember how Hungarians lived in 2022/23. The most common Hungarian street name in their photo series The Petőfi Streets of Hungary was helpful to the photojournalists, who roamed and photographed 2,800 streets to get a great insight into Hungarian society, to present this vision in an exhibition at the Capa Center and now to give it a lasting form in the form of an album.
There is another sad reason why the release of the album is considered so important. This was the last work of Simon Móricz-Sabján, a Capa Grand Prize-winning photographer and founder of Pictorial Collective, who died with tragic suddenness six months ago, and it is important to them that it is preserved and thus reaches many people.
What is striking in the pictures is not the extreme poverty and misery, because that is not what the photographers encountered most often during their travels, but the aesthetics of folk DIY that embellish the greyness, often intended to cover up the insecurity of existence. The photographs depict the people we often forget because they are not marginal enough to make the news, yet they are the face of our country, and they shape the everyday life of the Hungarian countryside; they are us. A testimony and a confrontation both today and in the future.
Details of the community fundraising can be found here.
Photographers: László Róbert Bácsi, János Bődey, Bálint Hirling, Balázs Mohai, Simon Móricz-Sabján †, Zsófia Pályi, Ákos Stiller, Ádám Urbán and László Végh, members of Pictorial Collective
Curator of the exhibition and editor of the book: István Virágvölgyi, Artistic Director of the Capa Center
Balazs Gaspar
Cover photo: Simon Móricz-Sabján
Source: Press release
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