For more than a decade, photographer Lenke Szilágyi (who has also been working as a photo-archivist in the Archives for a number of years) has regularly traveled to the (former) Soviet Union, witnessing and documenting the fall of Communism and Post-Soviet realities not only in large centers like Moscow or St. Petersburg but also in the provinces (the Black Sea coast, the Volga region, Karelia, etc.). Her photos are sensitive imprints of an era of constant change and territory of eternal immutability. She depicts in her portraits the hopes and despairs of the time, while also adding her own witty commentaries in the diary entries accompanying the photos. This exhibition is the first major presentation of this collection.

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Lenke Szilágyi started her career as a documentarian of the Budapest underground in the 1980s: her unique portraits of legendary literary figures, artists, actors, filmmakers, musicians, and members of the democratic opposition and her sensitive photos of the everyday life of this scene made her one of the most important photographers of the period. In the mid-1980s, she began her travels all over the world; it was in 1990 that she first travelled to Moscow, on an assignment for the samizdat journal Beszélő to cover the Helsinki Conference. But she also documented a city that was at the time still the capital of the Soviet Union, which collapsed a year later.

   A year later, she spent four months in the crumbling country in the company of a Hungarian Bulgakov-scholar and his friends. They stayed in Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, also travelling to conferences in St. Petersburg, Samara or Kyiv. She spent the last month of this sojourn on a voyage down the Volga and on the Black Sea. The photos she took during her voyage, again, focus more on the people and their immediate surroundings than on the sea or the majestic river with its colorful autumn landscapes.

   In 1993, the Georgian-Abkhazian war prevented Szilágyi and her friends from returning to Sukhumi, so they spent one month on the Russian coast of the Black Sea, in Gelendzhik, from where they travelled to the Crimea (then part of Ukraine), to St. Petersburg, and to Lake Ladoga in Karelia. Her lyrical reports (and the diary she kept during this journey) reflect her deep understanding of country life and of the local people, whether in sunny Crimea or in cold, northern Karelia. This sensitivity emerges clearly in her portraits of smoking youngsters or resting old women, too.

Szilágyi returned in 1996 to war-torn Sukhumi (under adventurous circumstances: using a fake passport), finding burnt-down houses, and hardly any of her former friends in the once charming city. In the following years she regularly traveled to Russia: she took a trip to Lake Baykal and Irkutsk in 2001 and spent a couple of weeks on the beach at Blagoveshchenskaya on the Black Sea in 2002. Wherever she went, she took photos that, to quote art critic András Bán, are “unique, and do not tolerate captions or comments… they are meaningful in themselves as if floating... ” Their compositional wit and sometimes their sheer strangeness capture the spontaneity of street scenes

Her scenes capture the peculiarities of the post-soviet era with a great sense of composition, light, and environment, showing a remarkable ability to communicate both humor and tragedy. The exhibition brings together photographs in both black and white and color, many of which were processed and developed by the artist herself at the time.

Curator: Katalin Székely

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KOLTA Galeria proudly presents a master exhibition – KONDOR Laszlo; a Leica on the Frontline (Chicago 1968 –Vietnam1969-70) the photo exhibit opens with greetings by Katko Tamas, Art Director KOLTA Galeria and a conversation with the photographer will be moderated by Ditzendy Attila, Journalist.

 Hungarian born photographer Kondor Laszlo,having lived in the United States for the latter half of the 20th century, returning to Hungary after the fall of the iron curtain - is now 78.   This photographer has spent much of his professional life documenting world events from the US Vietnam War with its inevitable anti-war violence on the streets to the political halls of Chicago‘s Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-1976. ) Not a stranger to conflict, having survived and fled the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

 The Leica on the Frontline exhibition looks at Kondor’s response to the conflicts he witnessed. The trilogy of analog black and white images were createdin the late 1900s. The point of departure begins with a selection of work as a photojournalist in 1968 Chicago – The Whole World is Watching.  A counter-reactionis the work as a combat photographer in 1969 -1971 Vietnam – Bootson the Ground.  The finale - LifeGoes On includes images that reflect reality, lyrically with empathy and sensitivity for the Vietnamese civilians caught up in the conflict, such as the iconic image Saigon Street Orphan 1970. The exhibition’s 70 works include 20 from the permanent collection of the NVAM, National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

Megan Owoc, NVAM Collectionand Gallery Coordinator:

“Laszlo Kondor’s photographs of the Vietnam War are essential to the National Veterans Art Museum’s permanent collection. Kondor’s photos capture the inexorable horrors andanxieties of wartime, as well as the enduring moments of camaraderie, empathy,and innocence of both the American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. These important images illustrate, first hand, the moments that defined the experience of serving in Vietnam during the war, and that continue to shape the character of our country in the years since.”

Kondor rarely exhibited, the day-to-day pressure of creating photographs for the press, in publications, and in printmay explain why.  The photographer was either directly commissioned by one or another magazine or client to produce their photos, or his photo-reports from the front lines of the Vietnam war were published in newspapers. However, Kondor had an instinct to horde and carefully maintained an archive of work from his 35-year career. Today, retired and living in Kapolcs, Hungary, Kondor is revisiting his archives to select images that illuminate his life in photography.  

In September 2020, this exhibit will travel to the NVAM in Chicago with a corresponding documentary film - Out of a Darkroom, the Life of Kondor Laszlo by Endre Dozsa and the publication Kondor Laszlo, as I Saw It - Vietnam Era, edited by Mate Havasi.

Ilona Nyilas’s photos comprise a rich and diverse set that spans decades and continents, and which is kept together and structured by a powerful element, the photographer herself, her subjectivity and mode of perception. Europe, America and Asia provide the stage of the pictures, with such points of thickening as London, Paris, Miami, Dubai, and Saigon. The thread that runs through the images is the photographer’s sensitivity, the keenness and surprising quality of her observations, the lyricism of her mode of perception. She captures moments the man in the street or a tourist would miss, because instead of the impressive views of a city or countryside, she trains her lens on unexpected events and moods that happen to unfold when she passes by.

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