www.kerekisandor.hu/en, February 2022

Sándor Kereki was born in 1952 and at the age of 16, while still in high school, he started taking pictures with the camera his father gave him for his birthday. He never studied photography in a formal school setting. He made his photographs for more than ten years, wandering around Budapest, looking for situations, looks and faces. He always took his photographs for his own pleasure and never to order – in an age when people still allowed themselves to be photographed. He put down his camera in the 1980s – his closed oeuvre consists of seven thousand exposed negatives, of which 1,775 photographs were also uploaded to Fortepan in 2021. Photography in Sándor Kereki's life was the period before choosing a career, the passionate and free period of him growing up. Kereki's photographs have their place in the canon of Hungarian photography, it would be a mistake not to continue the work started by Fortepan. The website was created as the first stop of the project that elaborates the oeuvre of Sándor Kereki. It collects two hundred previously unseen photographs, the artist's life journey and archival materials, as well as the most important articles published so far on the subject of his photographs – with a further long-term plan to explore the entire oeuvre.

Sándor Kereki’s work—produced only in one decade—is difficult to fit into commonly used categories of photography. Processing and presenting his complete oeuvre is a task that cannot wait. We believe that our memories, the archives of the 20th century, and our shared photographic legacy must be arranged into a form that is visible and accessible to all, securing their future visibility as well. Unless preservation is undertaken today, these treasures will disappear forever, with only a few remaining at best, exclusively in the online world.

Photograph: Sándor Kereki

“In the 1970s, things looked pretty dim in Hungary. Yet, Sándor Kereki’s photos showed how much wider the world would get without this gloominess. His images were not, however, deceitful veils concealing reality, like all the tolerated or supported products of entertainment industry at the time. His pictures sought and promoted life, and that was what made them capable of transmitting vitality even from such a sinister period.
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Some recurring locations in Budapest had intrigued Kereki; markets, popular parks, benches, squares, specific neighborhoods. Times he knew the light would be good here and there. The streets and the photographer’s walks, the hunter’s instinct with which he patrolled his territory; or the places and events he evidently frequented and enjoyed capturing. In his presence, something always happened—we could think, but that is not how it works, reality does not leave a good picture on each corner of the Grand Boulevard. Sándor Kereki’s photos are results of immense commitment and patience. Having recurring locations reveal the same commitment; Kereki knew that there, sooner or later, something would happen.
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What really made the photos taken by Sándor Kereki wonderful was his ability to penetrate, with his camera in hand, the Iron Curtain. Unnoticed, from Budapest in the 1970s, he was part of the leading international trend of street photography.”

/Szabolcs Barakonyi on Sándor Kereki/