BARNABÁS NEOGRÁDY-KISS IS THE WINNER OF THE CAPA GRAND PRIZE HUNGARY 2020
The jury selected Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss for his entry entitled Double Bond as the Capa Grand Prize Hungary-winner in 2020.
The Robert Capa Photography Grand Prize Hungary was founded in 2014 by the Capa Center to recognize the work of artists who produce an outstanding achievement in the field of Hungarian photography. The awards were decided in two stages by a five-member jury of Hungarian and international professionals. In October 2019, the jury selected three candidates – and awarded each of them with a fellowship of HUF 500 000+200 000 (approx. €2000) – for the Grand Prize of HUF 5 million (approx. €14,000) in total. The jury appreciated Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss’s work during tha past fellowship year, so they selected him as the fifth Capa Grand Prize-winning photographer. He received a cash award of HUF 3 million (approx. €8,300) at the award ceremony on October 21, 2020, held on the occasion of Robert Capa’s 107th birth anniversary in the Capa Center – behind closed doors due to Covid precautions.
My sight is indescribable, cannot be visualized. Only those will know, those can understand it who have experienced it. Whatever I focus on, it will always be halved; if I look at the half of the half, that will be halved as well. I tried to conceive of photography as a study but I had to realize that I didn’t want this series to be an illustration of my vision. I had to dig a bit deeper to understand what this entails, what thoughts, connections, bonds form in my head. I tried to simplify a rather complex thing: the communication between pictures. Like when you try to filter out things that are interesting for you from a scene and then follow up on thoughts based on this filtering. Experiences, perceptions, half-thoughts, partial pictures, the big whole forming in our head. You see a round “O” when looking at a neon green floaty, I visualize a “C”-shaped half-green floaty. Following this train of thought, we’ll arrive at completely different conclusions; me at the letter “C,” you at the letter “O,” you end up with a UFO, I’m left with a boomerang.
I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a car.
The driver:
– So what do you see of this billboard?
– What billboard?
In my world, that billboard didn’t exist at that time. This made me realize that all those things we don’t see are still contributing to our lives.
Is anyone actually interested in what is beyond that mountain, behind your hands, under the water, behind our backs?
To see everything all at once, whatever it is in front of me, that’s just a memory at this point. Thus the space I see is an image put together in my head with a time shift, like a mosaic. Do we all think in pictures? Do I recall things as a whole?
I’m lying on the king-sized bed at my mother’s place after my second surgery, watching television. There’s a movie on and there’s a scene where two characters are walking and having a conversation — cut scene, and I only see a human face up close, and the character is seemingly listening to something, but I hear words, I hear someone telling a story. What the heck is going on with this movie? Are they showing us the character who isn’t even talking? Why is the other one still speaking if they aren’t on-screen? In exhaustion, I looked at the doorway, it was to the right of the TV, and I saw from my periphery that there were actually two people talking in the movie, then I looked back and saw one person again. What the fuck? I had no idea what was happening to me. I got scared, I studied it, I have accepted it by now.
WORKS BY THE FELLOWS
Over the past decades, an increasing percentage of the world’s population lives in cities and the rural areas are depopulating. The UN forecasts that by 2030, two-thirds of humanity will be living in cities, on 3% of the Earth’s land. This means people remaining in the countryside will be responsible for the cultivation of 97% of the territory. In East-Central Europe, rural life practically collapsed after 1989 with the dissolution of the collective farms, the influx of agricultural products from the West, and finally the integration into the European Union. In Hungary, the rural is especially on the periphery: one city, Budapest is accountable for over 39% of the national income. By tracing the edges of this phenomenon, documenting the tiniest villages scattered around Hungary, settlements with a population below 100, Dániel Halász is seeking to define the spectrum and to point out the dichotomy between the megacity and the melting away human settlements of the country that have lost their purpose. He traveled over 14,000 kilometers in the past two years, visiting over 70 of these villages, in an urge to move his eyes beyond the focal point and into the Hungarian periphery, using the camera as a microscope, documenting people, the built environment, objects, and landscapes. How does the rural state of mind appear through photography?
The diversity of the place, which many people simply call the Chinese market, is remarkable compared to Hungarian conditions; there is a cultural cavalcade at the former Ganz factory plant, which now is also notoriously surrounded by a criminally dangerous merchant environment. A city inside the city came into existence here, which operates completely segregated. About thirty years ago, due to the relaxed visa requirements, the Chinese community in Hungary grew from almost zero to about twenty-seven thousand people in just a few years. The location of my work is the Chinese market in Budapest (Kőbányai Street), which is also the center of the Hungarian Chinese community. Locals have always had second thoughts about the market because in the media it is often connected to illegal imports or raids but, at the same time, it also provides a good opportunity to buy cheaper products. T he National Tax and Customs Administration of Hungary constantly monitors the market, but to no avail as it is practically impossible to catch anyone in the act of committing a crime. Although nowadays not only Chinese people work here but also Vietnamese, Mongolian, Romanian, Afghan, Turkish, and Ukrainian workers, the name Chinese market has remained. With an industrial exterior left behind from the Ganz factory period, the place is permeated by a strong sense of Chinese culture and marketatmosphere, all planted in an Easter European milieu.
