Hungarian Photography Alive And Well

The 2009 Hungarian Press Photography Awards have been announced. The overall winner is a stunning series of Roma (Gypsy) grieving by the Hungarian photographer Béla Szandelszky. My favorite is the one of three woman grieving. The site is in Hungarian but Google translate does a reasonable job (to English anyway). And of course there is the inevitable Flash navigation to come to grips with. This means it is very hard to link to the actual photos themselves, but perhaps the point. Nonetheless this form of navigation is an irritant.

All the photos demonstrate that the rich tradition of Hungarian photography that includes André Kertész, Robert Capa, László Moholy-Nagy and Marton Munkácsi to name but a few of the greatest photographers of last century, is very much alive and well.

Indeed the Szandelszky series marks almost a century of Hungarian ethno-photography when Kertész began photographing local villages, Roma and Hungarian village, and urban, life in general.