PROGRAMME

27 May

Gabriella Csizek, curator, Robert Capa Center for Contemporary Photography, Budapest

museum presentation of 20 minutes followed by q & a and discussion

Robert Capa, the Photojournalist - Permanent Exhibition and the Master III. Set.
On 13 June 2023, the world's first permanent exhibition of Robert Capa's oeuvre, Robert Capa, the Photojournalist, opened in the new exhibition space of the 10th anniversary Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest. The exhibition is based on nine hundred and thirty-seven enlargements of Robert Capa's oeuvre, the Master III. Set series, acquired by the Hungarian State in 2008 and taken in the 1990s. These photographs were selected by his brother, Cornell Capa, and photo historian Richard Whelan from Robert Capa's first monograph, from nearly 70,000 negatives left behind by Capa. It was decided that only three enlargements of these negatives would be made in this size: one series is held by the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, the other by the Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo, and the third by the Robert Capa Center for Contemporary Photography in Budapest. The Hungarian collection also includes a Vintage Collection of 48 original photographs.
The unique exhibition presents some 138 photographs from the series, many of which have become iconic, and explores the main stages of the photographer’s oeuvre, organised according to themes defined by his oeuvre. Robert Capa’s work is important because his images and approach had a profound impact on the public, forever changing the norms of photojournalism and contributing to the understanding and memory of history.
The presentation introduces the collection and the exhibition, as well as the curatorial strategy underlying the concept and exhibition.
 After completing her studies in art theory and cultural anthropology, the curator, Gabriella Csizek, started working at the Hungarian Museum of Photography in Kecskemét. Later, she became the curator of the Hungarian Photographers’ House in Budapest. She is currently involved in the exhibition programme of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center as a curator. Her main field of interest is contemporary photography and related interdisciplinary areas. Gabriella participates in the selection and editing of photographic material for exhibitions and books, and her name is closely intertwined with the exhibition and catalogue series Continuous Present I. Continuous Presentation, as well as the Verzo Online Gallery.
She has been involved as co-curator and directing curator of several international partnership exhibitions, such as Magnum First (2014), Magnum Contact Sheets (2014) and Elliott Erwitt: Retrospective (2017), which was presented in Budapest together with Magnum Photos. She was the curator of the exhibition “As They See It. An Overview of Hungarian Photography” presented at the National Museum in Warsaw in 2017. She co-wrote the Hungarian chapter of the book series “The History of European Photography 1900–2000” with Kata Balázs. She is the curator of Sylvia Plachy’s retrospective exhibitions “When Will Tomorrow Be?” and “Gifts from the 20th Century and Beyond” (April 5 August 31, 2025).
She is the curator of the permanent exhibition in Budapest presenting the work of Robert Capa, and has worked on the concept and implementation of the new exhibition for several years.

1 July

presentations by Kenneth Andresen, University of Agder, Norway; Aneta Pavlenko, University of York; Petr Wohlmuth, Charles University, Czechia;  

Three ten-minute presentations followed by q & a plus discussion

The first social medium: postcards and narratives of history
Postcards, with the combination of images in the front and short messages on the back offers a discovery of what some call an early social medium. In less than one hundred years, the postcard has shifted from a ubiquitous part of daily life to an obscure and occasional academic footnote and is only now beginning to re-emerge as a valuable documentary form for researchers of communication history. This presentation addresses study of a historical collection of postcards as an early social media in the Western Balkans. The data for the current study is from image analysis and text analysis of a unique private collection of over 1,800 historical postcards from Kosovo, dated from 1900 to 1999. The analysis of the collection focuses how multimodal narratives present a history of social order and disorder in an area undergoing multiple dramatic transitions. The presentation seeks to discuss a typology of the postcards as communication (social medium, direct communication, multimodal narration, and historical documentation).
Since the late 1800s, Kosovo was occupied by the Ottoman Empire, the Austro- Hungarian Empire, Nazi Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, and Serbia. Military and civilian personnel left their mark in an, until today, unseen, and unwritten part of history through sending postcards from Kosovo to their loved ones back home. Along with that, they sent personalised but still very important stories that represent a time capsule from the past events and accounts. Additionally, these postcards carry images of Kosovo and the representation of exclusive, unpublished images of Kosovo.

This presentation looks at how Kosovo’s history is represented through the postcards’ images of people, landscapes, architecture, and other visual content from 1900 to 1999. These images were either taken by external photographers or local photographers and were meant to show living conditions and developments of notable events in Kosovo. The images represent a multitude of ethnic, religious, and national significance and they communicate fragments of the historic images that were used as direct communication through an early social. The postcards were sent form soldiers based in Kosovo, but also from students, tourists, businesspeople and from people living in Kosovo with relatives elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. They show tourists landscapes with now non- existing architecture and infrastructure showing the old market, old mosques, and churches. These historical postcards represent aesthetic and visual value, and a study of an early social medium providing narrations of troubled pasts.

Kenneth Andresen is Professor of Media studies at University of Agder in Norway. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Oslo. His research and publications over 25 years has been the fields of international journalism and media development, especially in relation to historical conflicts in Europe. He also conduct research on his hobby; collecting historical postcards from Kosovo.

Contested multilingualism in vintage postcards from Central and Eastern Europe
Vintage postcards from Central and Eastern Europe are a valuable source of information about multilingualism in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires and their successor states, especially when used in combination with other data (Almasy, K. 'The linguistic landscape of Lower Styria on picture postcards (1890-1920).' Prispevki za Novejšo Zgodovino, 59, 3, 2019; Sicherman, C. 'A Galician family in peace and war: The Sicherman/Schiff postcard collection, 1905-1921.' East European Jewish Affairs, 49, 2, 153-173., 2019). In this presentation I will use postcards from my personal collection to discuss (a) language choice in printed captions and greetings as a means of city-branding and a marker of language status and changing power relations and market demands; (b) linguistic landscapes (public signage) as an index of visibility and social stratification of individual languages and scripts (Jaworski, A. 'Linguistic landscapes on postcards: Tourist mediation and the sociolinguistic communities of contact.' Sociolinguistic Studies, 4, 3, 569-594, 2010), (c) language slogans as a means of nationalist propaganda, (d) hand-written messages as evidence of local linguistic repertoires, communicative conventions in informal writing, and language learning and crosslinguistic influence; (e) linguistic erasure, that is crossing-out of the text in one language as evidence of language conflicts and expression of identity politics. If time allows, I will mention language policies as reflected in postmarks and postage stamps.

Aneta Pavlenko (University of York) is a scholar of multilingualism. Her most recent book, with a vintage postcard on the cover, is Multilingualism and History (2023, Cambridge University Press).

Postcard collecting in the Czech Republic

Postcard collecting is a popular hobby in the Czech Republic. There is a distinct sub-community that attempts to collect postcards from all countries in the world. This sub-community is primarily centred around the Czech Postcrossing fandom. Postcard collecting is still a totally unresearched topic in the humanities in the Czech Republic. My paper will attempt to provide initial insights into the 'All countries of the world' sub-community from a historical anthropological perspective.
Petr Wohlmuth, Ph.D. is a historian and anthropologist, affiliated with Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Humanities.