Every past is my past: twentiethcentury photography Fortepan

Abstract

The exhibition 'Every Past Is My Past' displays a selection of more than three hundred pictures from the popular Fortepan digital photoarchives, which is now ten years old. The photographs are closely intertwined with Hungary's 20th-century history. The images capture the period in many ways and layers but with a focus on the perspective of ordinary people and their experiences conveyed by private photographs, which form the backbone of the collection. Two secondary school classmates, Miklós Tamási and Ákos Szepessy, began to collect the more than 110 thousand photographs of the digital Fortepan archives back in the 1980s. After a period of regular but haphazard collecting of discarded amateur photos and negatives in flea markets and other places, they launched an online site with 5,000 digitised images in 2010. Soon after this many private individuals and public institutions joined the circle of donors, now comprising 600 hundred, thanks to whose pictures the archives are augmented every month.