Róza Tekla Szilágyi's articles
When forms like the “MySpace angle” emerged
Interview with Brookly-based Canadian freelance writer, video game designer and podcaster merritt k about her new publication LAN Party
The Optimal Moment
On the Interest Toward Everyday Photography
Nowadays, we live in the age of banal image-making, since taking photos has become comically simple; anyone can snap pictures anytime. Remarkably, besides the interest in photos taken today, past-century vernacular photography is also drawing considerable attention.
“I’m more interested in the stories, the experiences, the memories, and the emotions surrounding photographs than I am in what they look like”
Interview with Annebella Pollen
Annebella Pollen is Professor of Visual and Material Culture at University of Brighton, UK, where she researches undervalued archives and untold stories in art and design history.
“The number of ‘ownerless’ vernacular images in circulation now is huge”
Interview with The Family Museum. The mission of The Family Museum is to explore our understanding of ‘family’ as expressed through vernacular photography, and the opportunities the archive offers for research and discussion around the history and practice of amateur photography.
by Róza Tekla Szilágyi and Szabolcs Barakonyi
“I became preoccupied with the collection, and not my own images”
Interview with Sándor Kardos, founder of the Horus Archives
Named the Horus Archives, the collection of Sándor Kardos has been expanding for more than 40 years, becoming, in terms of size, the largest private collection in Hungary. Quoting him: "I learned a lot from amateur photographers, from the hundreds of thousands of people whom I cannot know personally."
by Róza Tekla Szilágyi and Endre Cserna
A constant state of flux between uses and misuses
Interview with Michal Simunek
Michal Simunek is a Czech academic specialising in media studies and sociology. His scholarly interests span various fields, including the theory and history of photography, media studies, visual culture, consumer culture, and ethnographic research methodologies.
Interview with visual anthropologist & critic András Bán
Hungarian Interview Series (with English subtitles)
András Bán (1951), visual anthropologist, teacher, art critic, has been publishing reviews and essays specifically on fine-art photography and contemporary art since 1973. From 1993, he taught visual anthropology at the Department of Cultural and Visual Anthropology, University of Miskolc, and was co-founder of the Private Photo and Film Archives’s research group.
Interview with visual anthropologist & critic András Bán
Video
Tune in to our video with Sándor Kereki as he shares insights into his photographic legacy and the nearly lost body of work currently exhibited at the Capa Center in Budapest. Our exhibition Sándor Kereki – Budapest in the seventies from a boy’s perspective is open until February 4, 2024.
About the shifting line between the private and the public memories of the Soviet period
Interview with Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko, authors of the book titled In Visible Presence. Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos
The book is a vivid outline of the role that family archives play in the almost constantly changing zeitgeist – it does all this in such a manner that we can structurally understand the individual ways that inspired, catalysed and influenced the ways of everyday photography practices during the Soviet-era.
Interview with Miklós Tamási about finding the material that led to the exhibition titled Budapest – The First Golden Age
The photography exhibition displaying more than one hundred works in the Hungarian National Gallery celebrating the 150th birthday of Budapest is a huge success – so much so that the institution just extended the exhibition until 7 April. The exhibition organised in conjunction with the Fortepan digital photo archive evokes the Hungarian capital in its heyday, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We sat down with Miklós Tamási, founder of Fortepan to find out how he came across the negatives of photographs of Budapest, hitherto unknown in Hungary, taken by a German postcard publishing company and preserved in the collection of the Deutsche Fotothek in Dresden.
The four minutes of anticipation – Interview with Sue Smallwood about her collection of photo booth pictures – Collectors & their collection vol. 1.
Focusing on the collectors and safekeepers, Eidolon Journal starts a new series where we showcase a unique archive and collection every month!
In the first part of this new series we’ve talked to Sue Smallwood, whose collection of photo booth pictures captures raw emotions, offering glimpses into people's lives that we can all relate to.
"We are living in the image world"
Interview with Andrew Dewdney,
co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image
Andrew Dewdney, a research professor at London South Bank University, specialises in examining the paradoxes within contemporary visual culture through his extensive theoretical work. He is committed to developing systematic methods to unravel and comprehend these multifaceted complexities. His research primarily focuses on how computation has transformed the photographic image and how museum studies can aid in understanding the challenges related to heritages, collections, and archives in a born-digital world.
On visual literacy and framing the world through the camera’s lens
Interview with Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck, directors of the movie 'And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine' which is on a mission to measure the depth of humanity’s infatuation with framing the world through the camera’s lens; chronicling how we went from capturing the image of a backyard to a multi-billion-euro content industry in just 200 years.
“Amateurism is in the DNA of photography” – Interview with Núria F. Rius, curator of the exhibition titled The domestic camera. Amateur photography in Catalonia (ca. 1880-1936)
The exhibition on view in Barcelona reviews the phenomenon of amateur photography in the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing on a selection of recurrent and common themes and visual motifs that allow us to understand who practised photography as a hobby and how the language of amateur and popular photography was constituted at the beginning of the 20th century.
Editor’s Letter – May, 2024 – A. Robert Kaufman and the Posographe
In this article, you can read the editorial from our latest newsletter written by Eidolon-director Róza Tekla Szilágyi, which were sent out on May 2nd, 2024.
Editor’s Letter – June, 2024 – Wolves, white bears and memories
In this article, you can read the editorial from our latest newsletter written by Eidolon-director Róza Tekla Szilágyi, which were sent out on June 4th, 2024. We publish our monthly editor's letters, in which we reflect on recent events, approximately two weeks after the newsletter is out.
PET SOUNDS – Collected and edited by Alberto Vieceli – Collectors & their collection vol. 3.
The book PET SOUNDS edited by Alberto Vieceli was shortlisted in this year's Arles Book Awards in the historical book category. The volume showcases 320 record covers that have one thing in common: they depict musicians and animals.
“Looking quizzically at the medium” – Interview with artist Meggan Gould
Meggan Gould, an artist and professor who lives and works in the mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, several years ago walked into the California Museum of Photography's collection and accidentally opened the back of one camera among thousands on the shelves – and what happened afterward inspired the book 7 Pictures Remaining.
Rolls and condiments – Interview with Matthieu Nicol about his exhibition in Arles titled Fashion Army
Following his book project titled Better Food For Our Fighting Men, the French picture editor and collector of poor images, Matthieu Nicol takes an active part in this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles. Besides being part of the jury selecting the respected festival’s winner photography books, he is presenting his new exhibition titled Fashion Army – a project showcasing photographs from a recently declassified archive covering the late 1960s to early 1990s, consisting of 14,134 scans of negatives from the Natick Soldiers Systems Center, a U.S. Army's research and development unit. We met up with him during the festival’s opening week in Arles’ famous Bar le Tambourin.
Editor's Letter – September, 2024
On photographs taken and left in space
There is something unique about the Super-Wide Hasselblad camera and its 38mm lens, which Aldrin used to take the photograph with: NASA had an ongoing collaboration with the company since the beginning of the sixties. During the Gemini IV mission in 1965, the first spacewalk was documented by a Hasselblad – and the collaboration led to the historic images of the Apollo mission’s moon landing, also by Buzz Aldrin.
