Fotó Riporter Photography Magazine

During a visit to the Mai Manó House of photography in Budapest,  I came across this Hungarian photography magazine. Despite some pretty severe Hunglish, the edition I found (winter 2008) was devoted to the Hungarian born Robert Capa. What I found interesting about this is that the magazine had reproduced exactly, a series of stories from Picture Post and Life magazines and were therefore not the career highlights of an amazing career but rather, the work of specific assignments in Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Russia. This work felt like Capa in the raw rather than the collected works of a genius as I had seen in previous retrospective exhibitions (Ludwig Museum, Budapest 2009). To see his work as it was published at the time shows a photographer whose pictures are not all remarkable as works of art, some are quite ordinary. However, what is remarkable is that he was there in those terrible conflict situations and able to get those photographs. And then, from the mass of pictures comes the odd gem which over a lifetime amount to a great deal of gems. For myself, never very happy with the pictures I produce, this encourages me to continue telling the story and producing what I consider to be average pictures and then hopefully, from this body of work, an odd gem or two may appear.