Some of Sándor Kereki’s pictures were uploaded to Fortepan in 2021, but his photographs have a place in the canon of Hungarian photography regardless. In order to get there, it is absolutely necessary to organise a photo exhibition that selects from the entire oeuvre.
Sándor Kereki was born in 1952 and at the age of 16, while still in high school, he started taking pictures with the camera his father gave him for his birthday. He never studied photography in a formal school setting. When most of the photographs were taken, he lived in the neighbourhood of the sixth and seventh districts – so many local locations can be recognized in the pictures. The Capa Központ, the location of the exhibition, is very well connected to the streets that the photographer visited on his walks.
Sándor Kereki put down his camera in the early eighties. Before that, for a good ten years, he was walking around the city, looking for situations, looks and faces. He took his photographs for himself, for his own entertainment and never for someone’s request. He did it in an age when people still allowed themselves to be photographed.
Sándor Kereki’s photos in the Hungarian seventies evoked the now internationally recognized category of street photography. His closed and completed oeuvre consists of seven thousand exposed negatives. We are very fortunate to be able to select today’s fresh-looking images for the exhibition together with him, and to bring the exhibited material into dialogue with the photographic lessons of the time that has passed since then.