Museum holdings characteristically contain many a masterpiece that visitors cannot see. This exhibition rediscovers and reinterprets prized gems of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, aka Mai Manó House. This chronologically arranged display selects from the reserves of the museum, presenting a segment each from the oeuvres of five outstanding Hungarian photographers – Aladár Székely, Olga Máté, FG Haller, Ferenc Haár and Zoltán Berekméri – with each section based on a different curatorial concept. Each of the exhibition’s sections can be interpreted on its own, while together they showcase major trends in Hungarian photography over the last century.
Founded in 1991, the Hungarian Museum of Photography is the only specialised institution of its kind dedicated to the protection, collection and exhibition of photographs, with a corpus that is mainly artistic in character. Over 350,000 prints and more than half a million negatives can be found, with a a specialised library and archive. Alongside the works of the greatest Hungarian photographers – André Kertész, Brassaï, Martin Munkácsi and László Moholy-Nagy – hundreds more are kept, most of which are known only to professionals and await discovery by the public at large.
