Ever since it’s been technically feasible, photographers have been taking pictures of everyday life on the city streets. In the beginning, tripods were a must-have for photographing buildings and landscapes, and people were forced into studio rooms for portraits, because the long exposure time of early cameras didn’t allow the shooting of moving figures. With time, reality managed to “walk into” the photos, and slowly but surely, photographers discovered the thrills of street photography.
From the middle of the 1920s, the 24x36 mm Leica camera simplified street photography significantly: this format was able to create the conditions for both near and distant spatial details, and due to its small size, it was easier for photographers to remain hidden. For a long time, these pictures were equivalent to press photos, and the genre was called street photography only beginning in the 1950s. This photographic era lasted until the 1970s, from which point we can talk about contemporary street photos.
Curators Zsuzsa Demeter and Miklós Gulyás utilized Kiscelli Museum’s photo collection of approximately 200,000 pieces for the exhibition “IMAGE SCHEMA – The History of Street Photography in Budapest from the Beginning to Present”, as well as photographs from independent collections and living artists. The photos follow the city’s history while avoiding significant historical moments and figures; as Miklós Gulyás reminded us, street photography differs from press photography in that it conveys important details about our lives and society through visual elements that might appear trivial and insignificant at first sight.
The pictures that depict the metropolitan firewood shortage in 1919 and the tenant strike against usurious rents in 1910 are good examples. Everyday photographs taken of skaters in Városliget in 1900 and guests of the Lukács Thermal Bath are also among the many displayed pieces, as well as grim images, like scenery depicting nurses wearing gas masks during a civil-defense exercise in the ’40s, destroyed bridges, blind veterans begging on the street, horses being dragged to the slaughterhouse, and post-war scenes. Photographs exhibited in black frames cover the period lasting until 1956, followed by those in gray frames until the end of Hungary’s communist era, and finally, white frames hold contemporary pieces.
Visitors can find many unique photographic treasures from many eras at the exhibition; the last photo was taken in 2016. The museum’s collection isn’t integrated into the online database of Fortepan, so we definitely recommend stopping by the Kiscelli Museum to contemplate the diverse past of Budapest; “IMAGE SCHEMA” remains on view through June 25th.
