Month of Photography 2021 begins with 35 exhibitions – Selected photos from the displays

Organized by the Association of Hungarian Photographers, the Month of Photography offers events across the country again. Numerous photography exhibitions, which will open between 12 October and 30 November, have joined this year’s festival.

Along with smaller galleries, the festival features big-name institutions like the Hungarian Museum of Photography, the Hungarian National Museum, the Hungarian Natural History Museum, the Robert Capa Contemporary Photo Centre, the Szabó Ervin Metropolitan Library, and Art Market Budapest. In addition to the 21 galleries and institutions in Budapest, there will be plenty to see in the country as well, with Salföld, Pécs, Cegléd, Kecskemét and Debrecen all hosting events. Besides the traditional photo exhibitions, the Month of Photography also presents video art, sculpture and book illustrations, and you can even see the next generation at an exhibition of the Grammar School for Fine and Applied Arts’ photography students.

The festival kicks off on 12 October with an exhibition of the works of Margaret Watkins at Mai Manó House, a worthy sequel to the Weegee, Nobuyoshi Araki and Robert Doisneau oeuvre exhibitions of the previous Hungarian Months of Photography, organized by Mai Manó House and the Association of Hungarian Photographers. Black Light brings into relief the salient traits of the Canadian photographer’s art—her rebellious rejection of the traditions of her time, the articulation of eroticism and feminisim—with which Watkins laid the foundations for the new norms of public taste.

In an experimental vein

Calligraphy, at Art9 Gallery, is the joint exhibition of Zoltán Molnár, Péter Herendi, Imre Drégely and Attila Haid, aka Kvartér group. The artists examine the relationship of visual and linguistic signs, the photographic equivalents of handwriting and calligraphy, and it is up to the viewer to decide which type of sign to make the starting point for the deciphering.

Layers of Reality, which shows highlights from Anna Püschel’s project on synaesthesia, opens in PaperLab Gallery on 27 October. The Dutch artist complements her experimental photo works with the scientific approaches of different disciplines, while she offers personal solutions to the debates about synaesthesia.

Foton Gallery hosts the debut exhibition of the new members that the Studio of Young Photographers (FFS) admitted this year. Organized like a traditional salon, featuring the sets of the young experimenting new members, the exhibition also offers additional depth to viewers who are ready to answer the titular questions: Who? With Whom? Where? Why? What did they do? From 15 November, FFS’s new artistic project, an exhibition entitled True or False? #Information Overload in the 21st Century can be seen at the same venue. Coordinated by Tamás Don, the project looks at the questions of authenticity, manipulation and objective truth in the global communication space—which includes photography. Foton Gallery’s third event for the festival is Interdisciplinary Visions, an exhibition of acrylic-tinted chemograms by Zoltán György Fejér, who is also known in the Hungarian photography scene as an expert on theory.

At Dokubrom – RANDOM Gallery, the Random group, who use photography and photo-based media in diverse ways, explore virtual and artificial spaces, natural and urban landscapes, the aesthetic of public spaces and organic sceneries, and the possibilities of transforming them.

Gaia, Márk Martinkó and Marcell Piti’s exhibition at Mymuseum, looks into the interaction between humans and their environment, the evolution of this relationship, using photo and video.

Viktor Váradi’s Processing is a photographic narrative full of surprises; the exhibition presents what both may or may not be the story of a family. The heterogeneous body of exhibits is arranged on the basis of unconventional principles at TOBE Gallery, with the words that outline the events forming an extended haiku, according to Miklós Gulyás. Tobe also presents the last event of the Month of Photography festival, Soulscapes, where Dora Kontha brings to life her sensitive inner sceneries with the means of instant photography.

Outside Budapest

Pajta Galéria in Salföld celebrates its 30th anniversary with an exhibition that is open until next June. The renewed venue, which presents the contemporary photography collection of founder László Török, who passed away last year, continues to feature the works of artists who have been involved in the gallery's life since its inception.

Pedestament offers testaments of the personal memories of the creator, Zsolt Hamarits, in the Halász Rezső Gallery in Pécs. Trezor, also in Pécs, introduces Balázs Deim’s experimental works at Space.

In Cegléd, the Kossuth Community Centre’s Chamber Gallery presents a selection from Artist Portraits, a series by István Tóth, a student of Frigyes Haller, one of the last maestros of classical photography, who passed away five years ago.

The Borsos Villa in Debrecen bears witness to the fruitful collaboration of the Debrecen Photography Club with the Méliusz Juhász Péter Library with Visual Thoughts, ideas prompted by, and illustrations made for, well-known literary works.

The Way Things Stand, Zsolt Szamódy’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Hungarian Museum of Photography in Kecskemét on 20 October, and welcomes visitors until early January 2022. The display selects from an oeuvre of three decades, from the Tatabánya artist’s early landscapes and still lifes, through his recording of the decay of industrial relics, his photographic etudes on the Old Lake in Tata, to his images of seashores and his photographic reportage on exotic parts of the world.