Pictorial Collective: Danube Perspectives
Photography exhibition in Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1065 Budapest, Nagymező Street 8.
Free admission:
April 17 – May 19, 2018
Every day 11 am – 7 pm
Closed on public holidays.
Capa Center (Tivoli)
Curator: Zsófia Somogyi art historian
Special thanks to Gabriella Csizek.
One of Europe’s largest rivers has inspired countless photographers, and each photographer has shown an entirely different aspect. They have done so not only because the river appears different in the various genres or ages, but also due to it being pictured by a variety of artists. Who approaches it as a subject and how do they look at it? What do they pay special attention to? To the landscape in the background? To the people who live near or by the water? And anyway, where do the photographers take up their position? On one of the riversides, from where they look at the water? Or on the other side or they are on the water, looking out? Do they merely present that people are looking at the river or just the other way round? Do they show what the water “may see,” while meandering through various countries and landscapes? How do the pictures reflect the phenomenon that the river links realities that comparatively could be even on another planet? And if it didn’t meander all the way among them, perhaps these parallel universes would never be connected to each other and, moreover, perhaps they could never meet.
The exhibition presents these realities and thus turns the course of the Danube into one big story for the visitors, rendering the parallel universes into chapters of this story.
The Capa Center’s exhibition Danube Perspectives is selected from the series of the photojournalist group Pictorial Collective. Each member traveled to a different section of the river in a different country in order to photograph the life of the people who live there, the (seemingly) untouched landscape or the built cityscape flanking the river as a set scene with faces, activities, and views. As such, the viewer can put together the images with related stories. There is a place where a severe social-historical issue is condensed into seemingly idyllic pictures, at another place unique sights affect the senses or moments are highlighted from the mundane; elsewhere beautiful images give us a taste of the water-world which is so unknown for our dry-land existence.
Exhibiting Pictorial Collective members: Bácsi Róbert László, Hajdú D. András, Hirling Bálint, Mártonfai Dénes, Mohai Balázs, Móricz-Sabján Simon, Stiller Ákos, Urbán Ádám, Végh László.
The exhibition was created with support from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade as a joint event of the Annual Forum of the EU Strategy for the Danube Region.