Uncropped

The exhibition Uncropped. Fragile Photographic Realities transports visitors to Hungary in the 1910s – a time when photographs were still captured on glass, and photographers’ studios were both technical laboratories and stages for life stories. The display draws on a rare and fragile treasure of Hungarian photographic history – a collection of 25,000 glass negatives, weighing two tonnes, created in rural photography studios and now preserved in the Museum of Ethnography.

The glass negatives held in the museum’s Photography Collection cover the entire map of post-First World War rural Hungary, preserving the imprints of photographers from seventy-five settlements. The title Uncropped refers to that fleeting moment before the picture is complete – when reality still trembled in the photographer’s hands. These plates capture not only the commissioned portraits but everything that was left outside the printed image: the screens pushed into the background, those waiting in the shadows, the hands holding the fabric backdrops, and sometimes even the camera itself.

The exhibition evokes the worlds of twenty rural photographers – from Károly Steindl’s studio in Körmend to Piroska Papszt of Szolnok, the first female photographer of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County. Through their images, we witness the social transformations of the period, the evolution of folk and civic attire, the spread of family photography, and the personal dramas of the First World War.

The exhibition also tells the story of a great act of salvage: when, in the 1920s, museum staff purchased forgotten negatives from attics and overfilled studio shelves, they literally rescued the faces of rural Hungary from oblivion. Uncropped speaks of both the human and the technical side of photography. The glass negatives, fragile in their very materiality, carry the passage of time within them – the cracks and flaking emulsions, too, have stories to tell.

Curator: Tímea Bata