Péter Németh Sz.: Home (Here and There)

Open to the public:
2017. 10. 19. – 2017. 12. 03.
Weekdays 2 pm – 7 pm
Weekends 11 am – 7 pm
Closed on public holidays.
The exhibition is free to visit.
Curator: Gabriella Csizek

Pécsi József Photography Grant at the Mai Manó House

The Pécsi József Photography Grant is among the most important, challenging, and rewarding opportunities for young artists in contemporary photography. Over the 26 years since it was established in honor of József Pécsi photographer (1889-1956) in 1991, the grant, available for one-year periods for maximum three times, has provided the opportunity and support to a great number of excellent photographers to develop subjects current in form and content alike, and present them in an exhibition accompanied by a catalog, realizing an important stage in their artistic career. Since 2000, the Mai Manó House is the organizer of the grantees’ showcase exhibitions, and for 17 years it has been representing the recipients of the Pécsi József Photography Grant with professional responsibility.

Home (Here and There) by Péter Németh Sz.

Once I had a classmate in elementary school. They moved quite a lot, depending on where his engineer father got a new job. He talked to me about his home here and there. He said that his home is “there”, where he was born and then they first moved from and his home is just “here” now, but always in another place. I grew up in Szentgotthárd, a basically quiet and not too exciting little town near the Austro-Hungarian-Slovenian triple border.

I moved to the capital in 2008. Right up till then, everything was obvious and even invisible that I associated with Szentgotthárd. Then it has slowly changed. The distance became a perspective and the new living area became a point of reference. I became a countryman in Budapest and a Budapestian in the countryside. The formerly habitual and trivial things have slowly become symbolic: the plastic chair thrown into the old swimming pool or the childlike Marlboro Man on the wall of the small grocery store.

However, the series does not intend to be a comparison between the capital and the countryside. You cannot tell about most of the pictures without reading the captions, which corner of the country they have been taken in, just like – and although there are few countries where these two are more sharply separated – even Hungary cannot be purely divided into capital and countryside. It is rather a kind of Lutra album, where I gather those nostalgic trifles from piece to piece, symbols, stereotypes, how we define our living areas and have also defined my identity.

Most of the photos have been taken in my personal surroundings, between 2014 and 2017 during some of my photojournalist works. Although their subject is personal nostalgia and most of the people and the scenes they show are tied to me through a thousand threads, however, the primary objective was not to make a kind of personal diary, but rather a documentation, which is strongly subjective due to the selection of the subjects, but it can give a peculiar cross-section of the country we live in. (Péter Németh Sz.)

Péter Németh Sz. has been working with photography since 2006. He studied at the photojournalist department of the Bálint György Academy of Journalism between 2012 and 2013. He began working as a trainee at index.hu at the end of 2013. He has been working as a photo editor and photojournalist at velvet.hu and divany.hu since early 2014, then he became the photo editor of index.hu in 2017.