Wandering around socialist Budapest

Fifty years after being taken and forgotten, photographs from the early 1970s by amateur photographer Sándor Kereki are available to the public in digital format. Kereki, born in Budapest in 1952, taught himself photography in early childhood. For the most part, he captured emotionally saturated scenes of Budapest, while wandering around the city meaninglessly.

The long gone grotesque atmosphere of the socialist Hungarian capital unfolds before our eyes through his spanshots. At the time, no one protested if their photograph was taken and the gates of the apartment blocks were wide open, he could have access to pretty much any subject matter anywhere. He found the constraints of an assigment difficult. Although his pictures appeared in several newspapers already during his high school years, he could not take pictures based on the instuctions of others.

Half a century after the pictures were taken, Kereki, donate his images to the digital community photo archive, Fortepan. Fortepan is an online digital photo archive that collects photographs taken before 1990, primarily private photos and pictures found in junk clearences in Budapest. Fortepan is run by volunteer editors helped by enthusiastic amateurs who decode the location of the images were taken, the event depicted, the people pictured and many other exciting details, because often the images come without any additional information.