CAPA GRAND PRIZE HUNGARY 2026 CANDIDATES
CAPA GRAND PRIZE HUNGARY 2026 CANDIDATES
REMEMBER ME? EVERYDAY LIFE OF AN UNRESOLVED CRISIS AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER
Depth of Field Narrative Group – DNG (Zsolt Balázs and Gábor Sióréti)
Our long-term photographic project follows the lives of people living in the immediate vicinity of Hungary’s southern border region. The focus of our investigation equally includes local residents, law enforcement officers serving in the area, and refugees. All of them have become unwilling participants in a prolonged and, for the time being, unresolved crisis that has taken shape in the region. Its locations are the surrounding forests, farmsteads, both sides of the fence, and the in-between spaces as well. This is a space where waiting for a solution, the pressure to survive, the fulfillment of duty, and the exhaustion that comes with it all collapse into one another. In this way, the physical border fence becomes not only a geographical divide, but also a psychological fault line inflicting trauma on everyone trying to make a life in this region.
In recent years, due to conflicts in the Middle East and the effects of climate change, large numbers of refugees have set out from the region toward Europe, leaving behind their families, homes, and former lives while undertaking the dangers of a nearly 6,000-kilometer journey across land and sea. Some arrive directly from conflict zones, while migration driven by economic hardship has also grown significantly. The southern border fence built along the Hungarian–Serbian border in 2015 was constructed as a political response to the European refugee crisis. Refugees arriving here accumulate at the edge of the Schengen Area and, in the absence of asylum procedures, settle temporarily in borderland. In earlier years they moved openly through nearby settlements; in recent years, however, they have increasingly hidden while waiting for an opportunity to cross the border. Yet these lands are already occupied. For the ethnic Hungarian farming communities of Vojvodina, they represent livelihood and home. Rival smuggling groups declare certain occupied territories their own, labeling them “Afghan” or “Pakistani,” and in some cases defending them with weapons. Over the past decade, illegal activities connected to human smuggling have evolved alongside migration itself and have by now become part of the region’s everyday routine.
This section of the Hungarian border has become a transit zone defined by repetition. Apprehensions, pushbacks, and repeated crossing attempts occur daily. Highly organized crossing attempts frequently take place simultaneously at multiple points, often supported by diversion tactics designed to distract the authorities. One such tactic involves firing steel ball bearings at police officers with slingshots. Refugees and smugglers caught crossing the fence one day are often returned the next, only to attempt the journey again shortly after, emerging once more from what border guards call the “Serbian depth” toward the “Hungarian depth.” For the law enforcement agencies protecting the border and nearby settlements, the work has become a nerve-racking and seemingly endless struggle. A smuggler cutting a “stargate” into the fence—a slang term for an opening through which refugees disappear almost instantly—smiles at the responding riot police officer arriving in the buffer zone and asks: “Remember me?”
Fear and uncertainty are palpable on both sides of the border. Burned-out smuggler cars abandoned by the roadside and recurring gunfire are alien experiences for local residents, who increasingly feel that the conflicts of the Middle East have moved to the edge of their homes. The environment surrounding the fence has become a stage for the tragedy of the situation. That tragedy emerges from the radically different positions, roles, cultural backgrounds, and social realities of those forced to coexist in the same space. The tensions generated by local and global political struggles ultimately manifest themselves in the lives of people who, at this very moment, are all simply trying to survive, move forward, and build a future. As so often happens in conflicts like these, individuals eventually become faceless numbers—statistics that will one day be forgotten.Through our ongoing work, we seek to investigate and document this complex situation by deeply engaging with it through the tools of documentary photography. At the same time, we hope to create a form of remembrance for those who became participants in this conflict through no fault of their own, so that their lives are not forgotten, and so that we, too, may continue to remember them.
In the spring of 2024, I lost my eighteen-year-old brother, Bálint, in an accident. His death not only broke our family apart, but also deeply affected an entire community of young people – his classmates and friends – who were standing at the threshold of adulthood, a stage of life that should be defined by the promise of the future rather than the experience of loss. This project grew out of this seemingly incomprehensible tragedy.
Our last conversation with my brother was about documenting his final year of high school. Three days later, the accident happened.
Remains of Us is a personal project that explores the complex experience of grief and trauma, tracing how it unfolds within both a family and a community. The loss of a loved one changes us profoundly, especially when it happens suddenly and far too early.
The project approaches loss as an ongoing state: a process of internal and external transformation that reshapes the body, memory, family roles, and our sense of the future. Its central question is how this experience becomes visible – how the presence of someone no longer with us persists through gestures, objects, and everyday rituals. How does trauma become part of our identity, and how do we change over time?
After his death, I began photographing my family and my brother’s close community, particularly his classmates and friends, who encountered loss for the first time during their final year of high school. His friends developed their own rituals, carrying his memory forward through objects, gestures, and shared acts, while trying to preserve the dreams and plans he could no longer fulfill. I went to the same high school, so following his final year also meant both returning to my own memories and facing the fact that he is no longer there.
At the core of the project is the long-term observation of my family and my brother’s close community: how our lives change over time, and how our relationship to loss evolves. The aim of the work is to make this process visible.
In the long term, the project will expand to include the experiences of other people dealing with loss, exploring both the emotional and physical dimensions of grief. I am particularly interested in transgenerational patterns, which are also present in my own family history: my paternal grandmother lost three young children before my father was born.
It is often said that tragedy makes us stronger. I believe trauma does not, in itself, make us stronger: it breaks us apart and reshapes us. What follows takes time, and depends on the work we put into it.
My brother’s absence shapes my life just as much as his presence once did. This, too, is a kind of relationship. Often, it is the actions born from absence that most strongly define who we become.
Remains of Us is not about death, but about what follows – about the transformations that occur, and how the presence of those who are no longer with us continues to shape our lives.
Pilgrims within the Borders of the Carpathian Basin
Pilgrimage is a retreat from everyday life, from our home environment, where everything reminds us of our chores and jobs. It is one of the most ancient forms of penance and devotion in the Catholic faith. Once a purely religious tradition, it has now become a colorful bustle, a fair and a fun-filled experience where the sacred mixes with the profane. This series of photographs captures this often contradictory, vanishing, traditional, yet constantly renewing scene in the Carpathian Basin, in Eastern Europe.
The documentary snapshots, portraits and object installations create a colorful image of the pilgrimage sites, frequently visited by Hungarians from inside and outside the borders of Hungary, in Eastern Europe. These festive rituals are indispensable to carry on the identity, beliefs, rich cultural heritage, customs and clothes of these people.
Religious kitsch is also one of the most widespread forms of kitsch, as can be seen in the world of fairing. It brings the believer closer to God. Religious sentiment is often expressed in objects with a profane purpose, such as a plastic bottle depicting the Virgin Mary, but we also find products that, in contrast to the traditional ideal of craftsmanship, obey the command of mass production via their simplicity and shallowness.
The photographs were made in several places throughout the Carpathian Basin. Andocs, Balassagyarmat, Csatka, Csíksomlyó, Doroszló, Gyöngyös, Vecsés or Mátraverebély-Szentkút – each of them are just couple stations of this series, which has been expanding for the last eight years now.
In recent years, numerous rural pubs in Hungary have permanently closed or been transformed according to local demands, often stripped entirely of their original function. In my photographic series No Credit, I have so far visited and photographed the still-operating pubs of settlements with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants in Heves County, based on subjective criteria. The project began from a personal connection. I was born and raised in the county, so the chosen region is one of the primary social and visual reference points of my own experience. I approached rural pubs as motifs through which the current social condition of the Hungarian countryside, as well as the everyday reality of marginalized social groups living on its periphery, could become visible.
Within the framework of the Capa Grand Prize, I would like to expand and realize this work in its final form. In the next phase, I plan to map pubs beyond Heves County, focusing on disadvantaged, peripheral, and semi-peripheral regions across Hungary, with particular attention to areas where social decline, migration, unemployment, and the disintegration of community structures are especially present. I still consider the pub as a starting point, but my aim is to create a more complex visual body of work that goes beyond simply documenting these locations. In this context, pubs function as communal nodes. Places where local isolation, generational shifts, economic decline, and questions of cultural identity become visible at once. For this reason, I do not only photograph pub interiors or their guests, but also the broader environments connected to them.
Between 2022 and 2024, with support from the National Cultural Fund, I began working on my project titled GOLDEN SAND, which explores the world of the Great Hungarian Plain and the Homokhátság region—my homeland in the narrower sense—with a particular focus on the challenges of the climate crisis, all viewed through a personal perspective.
After a short break, I began working on the continuation of this project, titled Houses Built on Sand, in the fall of 2024. This time, I am examining life in my hometown and the surrounding communities from historical, economic, and demographic perspectives, as well as from a perspective that remains deeply personal.
In the late 1800s, an epidemic of phylloxera (root aphids) ravaged Hungary’s vineyards, destroying 90% of the grape harvest in the country’s wine regions. However, farmers realized that the phylloxera dislikes sandy soil and the quartz crystal structure of sand, and cannot survive in it, so many winemakers were forced to move to the Great Hungarian Plain, specifically to the Homokhátság region. Despite the fact that they could not produce high-quality grapes and wine on this soil, only quantity. In the region, which until then had typically consisted of scattered farms, villages and towns began to form. It was then that my hometown, Csengőd, became a village, and it was at this time that my great-grandparents moved here with my grandfather, who was still a small child at the time. In the 20th century, viticulture and winemaking provided the livelihood for the region’s settlements. After World War II, the Soviet Union and its member states became the primary market. However, due to the changed political and economic conditions following the fall of communism, as well as increasingly severe droughts and the climate crisis, viticulture gradually declined. Without an alternative to replace it, the villages are gradually becoming depopulated and aging, and an ever-larger portion of the land remains uncultivated.
In my latest work, Houses Built on Sand, I explore this theme through archival photographs of my father and grandfather, as well as my own photographs. Both my grandfather and father were amateur photographers; I select and digitize photos from the inherited family archive, often cropping them drastically to recompose them, and then insert them among my own recent photos, thereby creating a dialogue between them. In this way, I show the past and present world of the Homokhátság region, spanning a time span of more than 80 years, through the subjective perspective of myself and my family.
