Nobody wants to take a bad picture. Anyone who picks up a camera does so with a clear intention, and the role of chance is rarely even an issue. Photographers want everyone to like their pictures, and they want to be praised for it. This need has not changed over time.
In the fifties, it was difficult for the amateur photographer to find an audience, there was no internet and therefore no online communities or forums. If you wanted feedback, you looked for a photography club or submitted your photos to a public competition called “photo tournament” or “photo competition”, where your images were judged against the highest benchmarks.
Uncovering of the Horus Archives:
In Hungarian photography, the Horus Archives has been a paramount one-man institution for decades, also constituting a remarkable vernacular photography legacy that must be preserved.
The team of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography together with Sándor Kardos set out on a singular quest in the past months, searching for pictures that had remained unexposed until now. This method is what we refer to as uncovering the archive. A so-far unknown stack from the decades-long collecting effort stood in the cellar of a family house. We had no idea what we would find in the boxes. The only thing we did know was that the collector had at least once seen these photos, and he refused to dump them. We were not disappointed with the decade-long collection for a second; the so-far unseen part of the Horus Archives remains to have surprises in hold.
Uncovering comprised the exploratory scanning—promising quick results—of the boxes in the cellar, with the aim of retrieving a thousand pictures the public has not seen before—these can be viewed on the Hórusz Archive’s new website. During the action, we also came across several materials that we present to the public in the form of an exhibition series. The first stop of this exhibition series is titled Photo Critique.