Collective Photography in the 20sth Century
Selected by Szabolcs Barakonyi
Fortepan is a modern Hungarian online archive of everyday photography, which is copyright-free and community-based, offering over 190,000 photographs available for anyone to browse and download in high resolution, free of charge. The images are free to share, provided that credit is given to Fortepan. Fortepan Masters is a photographic album which includes the most remarkable images appropriated from the Fortepan collection.
In the summer of 2018 I discovered a possible key to the Fortepan collection. I’d locked myself in with the photos and looked at them from start to finish. I believe that Fortepan is collective memory’s imprint of the 20th century. For the sake of experiment, let’s look at it as if it belonged to a single person who is Hungarian and lived through the entire 20th century.
The images in this publication are not based on narratives and do not follow a thematic or chronological system. The book combines solutions both in terms of material quality and graphic design, the publication has a double-spine book body and consists of triple page units, “triptychs” instead of page pairs. With the resulting surfaces, the possibility of image placement is multiplied, and images of different formats can be placed more democratically. The structure of the book invites readers to take an active part, who can also create their own photo-combinations in keeping with the way they turn the pages.
Fortepan Masters was on the shortlist of Les Rencontres de la Photographie’s 2022 Book Awards with 14 other excellent books in the historical book category and won the Hungarian Design Award 2022 in the Visual Communication category. In 2022 we also received the Mihály Gera award – the award is for an outstanding album presenting the most beautiful pictures by Hungarian or international authors, created in the past five years.
Szabolcs Barakonyi – Concept creator, art director and picture editor
Zalán Péter Salát – Creative concept of book design and picture editor
Róza Tekla Szilágyi – Editor
Publisher: Bazin Investments Ltd.
Managing director: György Simó
Published in English in 2021 and 2022
Szabolcs Barakonyi 