MÁTÉ BARTHA IS THE WINNER OF THE CAPA GRAND PRIZE HUNGARY 2018
The jury selected Máté Bartha for his entry entitled Kontakt as the Capa Grand Prize Hungary-winner in 2018.
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 2017, the jury selected three candidates – and awarded each of them with a fellowship of HUF 500 000+200 000 (approx. €2200) – for the Grand Prize of HUF 5 million (approx. €15,400) in total. The jury appreciated Máté Bartha’s work in the last year, so they selected him as the third Grand Prize Hungary-winning photographer. He received a cash award of HUF 3 million (approx. €9,300) at the award ceremony on October 17, 2018, held on the occasion of Robert Capa’s 105th birth anniversary in the Capa Center.
Contact: to touch; the state of physical touching. To connect. In military terminology: meeting the enemy; armed conflict with an opposing force.
After hours of driving, I’d finally arrived at the small village. It was late in the afternoon. A girl, wearing a camouflage outfit was waiting for me. Leaving the main road, we continued towards the depths of the surrounding forest. Commands echoed among the trees as we reached a small clearing. There, between military tents, uniformed children around primary school age were lining up silently. One of them struggled with push-ups, with an officer counting above him. I was led to the canteen tent, where another team was preparing the tables for dinner.
There’s an NGO in Hungary that organizes military-themed free-time activities for children between ages 10 and 18. While ’home defense education’ is becoming an important part of government communication, youth military education, as a phenomenon, is nearly unknown in Hungary. In some other countries of the world, it has a fairly long tradition. The Latin term ‘iuvenes’ or ‘iuventus’ – youth – was used for 14 year- old-Roman boys who had become old enough to start their first military training. The leaders of Honvédsuli [Home Defense School] – a family-support expert and a former French Legion soldier – believe they provide nature-oriented, patriotic, group experience-based education for the youth.
Waking up at dawn, running and doing exercises in the morning cold, followed by the orderly serving of a simple breakfast, which is then cleaned away by a service team. The officers – kids themselves – control the community of 40-50 with confidence: they teach them to line up, or to march on order, and that there’s a punishment for littering, bad language, or for losing a part of their equipment. They learn to use replicas of real-life guns, but most of the time they spend acquiring knowledge about survival in wild nature. The week-long camps culminate in a large-scale war-game where teams fight against each other in the surrounding wilderness. I’d observed this process many times, adopting their daily routine. Every time on the way home, I had the same question in my mind: is it only curiosity that drives me back again and again to this far-away world?
For some, the ban on phone usage or camping itself means heavy physical and mental pressure. The so-called ‘motivational training’, aimed at pushing one’s boundaries may look quite frightening: children creeping in mud or sweating under the sun while being shouted at. Some quit underway, and others decide not to take part at all. Still, around the evening campfire, they’re all proud of telling stories about completing what they could do. And in the meantime, they slowly arrive at the peak of their adolescence, facing responsibilities, freedom, and limits, pain, friendship, and love, perhaps for the first time.
The majority of these kids don’t wear uniforms or deal with home defense outside the camps. Some arrive from military families, but most of them will not take that path later on. Those who were attracted by the love of computer games will change their minds about this matter, exactly because of the hardships they experience in the camps. Others are being sent by desperate parents who feel they have failed at bringing up their children. These kids regularly tell they receive more attention during this one week period than in a year at home. And there are those who arrive from deep cultural and material poverty. For them, this isn’t only an adventurous game, or a community of close friends, but the strongest force shaping their identity. Something, they can be proud of.
The community organizes programmes throughout the year, themed around keeping historic traditions. They regularly take care of neglected war tombs or march for days, singing and wearing First or Second World War Uniforms, to commemorate fallen soldiers in every village they pass. They’re always greeted with hospitality and a warm dinner, lodged for the nights in local school buildings. For many of them, these adventures provide the only solid ground in life, a framework to understand the world and their position in it.
I genuinely fear war, and I have never idealized violence either. The presence of weapons and death as a thought made me uncomfortable in a kids’ camp. But it was an equally surprising and liberating experience to hear about the importance and uniqueness of life in the very same context from them. What I would have labeled at first with terms like ’conservative’ or ’nationalistic’, later seemed hard to place in the coordinate system of today’s popular ideologies. Honvédsuli’s leaders state that their militaristic approach and the challenges they impose are able to demonstrate the importance of effort, the role of community, and the value of simple things such as nature, warm food, or a comfortable bed, in a society becoming ever so slothful. There are always many weeping faces at the camp closing ceremony, as most of them can’t wait to return next year. While I, at the same time, think about what I felt seeing kids with weapons at first, and now, one and a half years later.
Images of violence surround us in the shape of photography, films, toys, and video games. I have come to realize that perhaps for this very reason my standpoint on weapons, war, or home defense is vague. Like the 13-year-old, who’s falling back on the ground over and over again but still is trying hard to climb that muddy rope – the same way I’m trying to refine my approach.
WORKS BY THE FELLOWS
The core of Wounds Of Violence deals with those geographical sites of Mexico where illegal, contemporary mass graves have been discovered, contrasting the local landscape that had been violated by these graves with the mental, physical consequences that these extremes have had on women in the area.
The work for the Capa Prize continued the themes of Wounds Of Violence by focusing on one specific case: the lives of a women’s group searching for the remains of their lost loved ones at the sites of mass graves found near Veracruz, Mexico in 2016. These are the largest mass graves found in the history of Mexico, and most likely, in Latin America. This specific search group consists of 180 women, working independently to identify the remains. They are self-funded, making the money required by selling food and used clothes. My work focused on getting to know and illustrate their everyday lives,
by relying on their confessions, emotions, and our shared conversations. I felt that this distant reality could be brought the closest to the spectator in an emotional sense by showing its day-to-day happenings in the most humanistic way possible. Providing this world with faces, emotions, and voices, to show how the survivors feel, live, and think as well as to present an environment outside the statistics and tragedies of newsreel footage.
I first arrived in Veracruz on August 3, 2017, on the one-year anniversary of finding the graves. I decided to work with the group for another year, until the proposed closing of the site.
I found a way to contact the head of the group, Lucy, in a local paper. The position of the graves is peculiar: they are not situated in a deserted place, far from houses, but about a 15-minute walk from one of the suburbs of Veracruz, Colinas De Santa Fé. Lucy put me in touch with Celia, who lives in that particular suburb, and spends eight hours of every workday by excavating the graves, with the help of a few other women. Celia welcomed me to her home, we woke up and had coffee together, then walked to the entrance of the graves, watched the sunrise, and met the other members of the group at a designated meeting point. I had not received authorisation, so I was officially unable to enter the site. I was snuck in once with the help of the group.
There were 731 missing persons registered in the state of Veracruz in 2018. The Colinas de Sante Fé site was fully excavated, with only 16 of the 300 dead bodies identified. 2018. There was another mass grave found in Veracruz on September 8, 2018, with the remains of 166 people.
DARK YET LIGHT-SENSITIVE
1.
Any body immersed in humour experiences an apparent loss in weight that is equal to the weight of the problem displaced by it. Archimedes’ principle personalized. It is no happenstance that one of the darkest and most bitter chapters in the history of Hungary was elevated to an unreservedly discussable chapter by a comical motion picture, “The Witness” (also known as “Without A Trace”) directed by Péter Bacsó in 1969. While Bacsó’s film is about the darkest pits of hell, its cheerful scenes iron out the wrinkles of the past and relieve somewhat the remaining burning shame via jest. “Life’s no piece of cake,” says Comrade Virág, and like this, embalmed in humour, it seems almost acceptable that the world can at times degrade into a shameful place. Lo and behold, the recipe on how to address the dictatorial world of the Rákosi and the early Kádár era (1945-1963), skipping the strict confines of academia. A world, in which hundreds of thousands were sent to labour camps, imprisoned, or executed on false charges in the course of show trials. And we were overshadowed by an era, where people were terrified. They did what the conductors of the party and the political police commanded them to do so. If they had to, they applauded; if they had to, they sobbed; if they had to, they were staring past bloody political trials glassy-eyed. These were hard times, permeated by evil.
2.
And then along comes a photographer who decides to process this era with his own tools. His intentions are contradictory to common sense since this ramose series of events full of secrets and labyrinthine mysteries is nigh impossible to interpret in the language of the visual. Even if it is, it’s at most in a conventional, partial, superficial manner. Possibly, in alliance with words and facts, but then quite awkwardly. Dániel Kovalovszky, however, has taken on the challenge. How is a photograph transformed into a feeling, the feeling into words, the words into accurate, expressive sentences? It takes discipline and humility to realize the role one plays in a story. Kovalovszky does not wish to become the protagonist. He simply undertakes the task to show in its entirety, and present in a comprehensible way an ugly slice of history, through the lens of his camera. But can that be accomplished? Judging by this collection, it can. For though the subject is dark, yet it is light-sensitive..
3.
A significant amount of work resulted in a historically accurate, photographically uniform photo series that shows not only the sometimes collapsed, other times well-preserved scenes of jails and prison camps of the fifties but also the material legacy of those camps as well as surviving political prisoners. A cell fallen into ruin, a barbed wire embedded in a tree, and faces of old men, strange or familiar from public life. Venues of political trials, photographed both from the side of the accused and the judge. Furthermore: how, through generations, the perception of perpetrator and victim may interchange. A villa where, among others, Rajk was interrogated, and an outbuilding turned music hall that helped mask the screams emanating from the basement. The door handle of the Rákosi villa’s living room, rocks, mining lamps, gazes, documents, old photographs. Objects that mean nothing, or hardly anything in and of themselves. As if we saw the Titanic’s scattered wreckage, the memories of passengers lost in the waves. A meticulously collected pile of memories. And yet: the intentionally faded, desaturated images of an old large format camera, the objects taken out of their environments, and the apparently uniform portraits not only evoke the corresponding time period, but provoke thoughts on it, too. Three historians had assisted in the project, but that is not the only reason for its authenticity. It is also due to the fact that the photographer did not let anything in front of his lens which seemingly is something. He only captured what actually is.
4.
There is a photograph in this collection, there is a black square on it, nothing else. A liberal rendering of Malevich. It’s a spoiled image, got exposed, so normally, it would end up in the trash. But this case is not normal, and this black square incorporates the essence of the era, which was dark, pitch black. That frame incorporates the times with all their tragic events, sticky secrets, inhumanity, carelessness, evil, and surreal drama. A black square. A frame that got exposed – to the light of the interrogation lamps.
Zoltán Trencsényi
PUBLIC PRESENTATION OF THE CAPA GRAND PRIZE HUNGARY 2018 FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS
The three fellowship recipients selected earlier – Máté Bartha, Adél Koleszár and Dániel Kovalovszky – gave a report on their work to the jury in a public presentation event at Capa Center on October 16, 2018.
