www.horusarchives.com, September 2023
The Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography was established to provide a platform for the research, presentation, and preservation of vernacular, amateur, and family photography. We are convinced that this genre is of substantial cultural value and can reveal hidden narratives regarding the social, cultural, or political aspects of the photographs’ origins. Vernacular photography’s visual heritage lies at the intersection of creativity and everyday routine, the common and the unrepeatable, fine arts and history; vernacular photos are exceptionally apt to serve as messages mediating knowledge across languages and periods.
Source: Horus Archives
In Hungarian photography, the Horus Archives has been a paramount one-man institution for decades, also constituting a remarkable vernacular photography legacy that must be preserved. The countless iconic images of the Horus Archives are not only points of reference, but road maps to see reality, through photography, with new eyes.
While the collection of Sándor Kardos, a Kossuth Prize recipient cinematographer and photographer, has been exhibited frequently, it never had an online presence, which may prevent the latest generations from discovering it. Thus, we decided to undertake the gradual online publication of this unique archive; and to this end, we’ve embarked on a treasure hunt among the archive’s boxes, untouched for years.
Together with Sándor Kardos, we set out on a singular quest in the past six months, searching for pictures that had remained unexposed until now. A so-far unknown stack from the decades-long collecting effort stood in the cellar of a family house. On some of the boxes of various sizes, we recognized traces of the initial categories, but with the majority, we had nothing to begin with; we had no idea what we would find in them. The only thing we did know was that the collector had at least once seen these photos, and he refused to dump them.
The collection has been subject to a number of legendary remarks, one was articulated by photomuseologist Károly Kincses, who asserted that processing the Horus Archives would take either three people six years of work, or six people three years of work. For now, we cannot prove nor disprove Kincses’s calculation, as we have employed a different method. This method is what we refer to as activating the archive.
Source: Horus Archives
Activating comprised the exploratory scanning—promising quick results—of the boxes in the cellar, with the aim of retrieving a thousand pictures the public has not seen before. We limited the action to six months, allowing us to reflect on our experiences as soon as possible. To put it mildly, that time was enough to touch at most a hundred thousand images. We literally could not go beyond touching film negatives and then putting them aside for the sake of time efficiency, as there were plenty of paper prints, large glass negatives, family albums, which simply grabbed our attention.
For the past six months, we have dedicated two days a week to this, mostly Mondays and Fridays, from morning to early afternoon. We divided the contents of the boxes into two, which then each of us sorted into three piles, labelled “yes,” “no,” “maybe.” When done, we swapped selections, and discussed the photos with disputed labelling. This was the first filter, and Sándor Kardos had veto power over every aspect, as it was essential that the original gaze of the Horus Archives discovered the “old-new” images. We laid the photos we selected in the first round aside for a few weeks, then picked them up and sorted through them again.
We were not disappointed with the decade-long collection for a second; the so-far unseen part of the Horus Archives remains to have surprises in hold.
Source: Horus Archives
Sándor Kardos:
Kossuth Prize recipient and Artist of the Nation cinematographer, film director, photographer born in 1944. Kardos graduated in 1969 from Eötvös Loránd University with a degree in Hungarian and People’s Education, and in 1973 from the College of Theatre and Film Arts as cinematographer. Between 1972 and 1979, he worked at the Mafilm studio as assistant camera, and from 1979 as cameraman; later, he was cinematographer and director at the Hungarian state television.
After directing several feature films, documentaries, and TV shows, he became the cinematographer of A kis Valentinó (Little Valentino). Made with director András Jeles, the film is considered outstanding in Hungarian cinema for its overwhelming atmosphere and stark artistic imagery to this day. The two continued collaborating on Dream Brigade and The Annunciation, the visual language of which also testifies to Kardos’s sensitivity and virtuosity. Throughout his career, Kardos photographed more than 30 feature films and more than 100 TV movies and shorts; with, besides András Jeles, Géza Bereményi, Péter Tímár, and others.
Parallel to his professional work, Kardos is involved with collecting amateur photography. Named the Horus Archives, his collection has been expanding for more than 30 years, becoming, in terms of size, the largest private collection in Hungary. Comprising primarily amateur and family photos, the Horus Archives can be regarded as one of the first private photography archives internationally, with international interest toward it evident in the number of European exhibitions, foreign publications, and artistic interventions. The history of the archive goes back more than 30 years. Flipping through family photos, Kardos realized already as college student that regardless of the length of his training, the creation of certain scenes would always remain beyond his capabilities. Browsing the archive’s images makes it difficult to decide whether reality or imagination proves more colorful.
