Budapest Photo Show Puts Truth on the Record

The 44th Hungarian Press Photo Exhibition opened at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest, presenting images selected from more than 6,200 works submitted by 258 photographers. The exhibition runs until 8 November. At its centre is a question that reaches beyond the gallery: who takes responsibility for what an image claims to show, as artificial intelligence makes authentic and artificially created material harder to distinguish?

The name behind the image

Managing director Orsolya Kőrösi described photojournalists not as invisible operators behind a camera, but as people who are present, bear witness, select and interpret. They also put their own names to the claim that what they show is close to reality, she said. Her account makes responsibility part of the work: the photographer is not separate from the image or its meaning.

Kőrösi said that the growing difficulty of distinguishing genuine material from artificially created content makes a venue that presents, protects and celebrates authentic photojournalism particularly valuable. The exhibition’s emphasis, as she described it, is on photographs made under a photographer’s name and responsibility. The issue isn’t only what an image depicts; it’s who stands behind it.

Photographer András Bánkuti, chair of the Hungarian Press Association (MÚOSZ) Photojournalists Section, said competition entries cannot be retouched, not even to remove a politician’s spot. “The moment you do that, it counts as interference and the picture is immediately out of the competition,” he said. The rule draws a firm line around what the contest will accept as an image: altering the picture disqualifies it.

Bánkuti also drew a limit to the organisers’ responsibility. “It can still be printed on any paper; that is not our responsibility,” he said. “Our responsibility today, when the greatest value and credibility are attached to a picture being real, we have to be very careful about that.” The distinction is plain in his words: the competition sets rules for entries, while Bánkuti says it cannot control where a picture may later appear.

Private grief, public witness

Freelance photographer Diana Nemeh won this year’s MÚOSZ Grand Prize for her series “Nimród.” Telex photographer Noémi Napsugár Melegh received the André Kertész Grand Prize. Napsugár Melegh has documented almost all major protests, but her greatest recognition came for photographing her own family and her brother’s classmates after her 18-year-old younger brother died.

She described returning to places tied to her brother, including the secondary school they both attended and the freshers’ camp where he should have been. “It was very difficult to make these pictures, especially in situations where my brother should have been there,” she said. The photographs came out of grief, but making them also meant choosing to be present in places made painful by his absence.

For a long time, she said, she made the pictures “for the drawer” and showed them to no one. After a year and a half, she began sharing them with her closest professional friends; she said that opened something in her mourning process. The exhibition presents personal stories alongside political pictures, including work selected by jurors as exceptionally important or exciting. It also shows the top three entries and special prize-winners across 16 categories. In a contest that bans retouching, the photographer’s name and the account of how an image was made remain central to what the public is asked to trust.