Capa Grand Prize Hungary Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center

The Capa Grand Prize Hungary was founded in 2014 by the Capa Center in Budapest, Hungary. The €15,000 prize was formed to promote mid-career photographers and it has been presented six times since.

Capa Grand Prize Hungary 2022 winner

SIMON MÓRICZ-SABJÁN: Permanently Overcast

The adversities we face in life and how we confront them are life altering and can shape the course of our lives: they impact our future, determine our fate.

I have been photographing the Great Hungarian Plain for over ten years. I am expanding on my previous photo essay: under a new title, I'm looking for more more stories from the region, my focus pivoting towards the lives and fate of these communities.

I have always been fascinated by the region and its impact on me. I marveled at their strength, and how the signs of impermanence can be felt all around, especially from up close and personal. These communities are in jeopardy from all aspects. They are negatively impacted by ageing, migration, and the lack of opportunities. The preservation of their traditions, customs, and rituals, the retention of younger generations, and the community’s survival overall are under threat. Younger generations and their parents move away early due to school closures. As a result, small general stores, and local pubs close, leaving the fate of places of public gatherings questionable. It is difficult to predict what lies ahead or predict the future, but according to recent studies conducted, as much as one-tenth of the Hungarian population will disappear and close to four-fifths will live in towns and cities during the course of the next few decades. Apart from the younger generations, few will experience drastic changes. However, the majority of the people in the region will be on a different path in comparison to the current one.

Country people are incredibly resilient. Strong communities could easily be the moving force behind improving their quality of life, making it even better than it had been for their ancestors. Their resilience stems from having a strong sense of identity and belonging, retaining them in place. People from the Great Plain know that regardless where the power is, the center of their universe is the place where they conduct their daily lives. Come what may, older generations do not feel threatened to leave the motherland, even if their children and grandchildren move away, and they know their future holds nothing more than loneliness and abandonment for the remainder of their lives. The world is rapidly changing even though many people continue to conduct their lives the same way they used to.

The year of 2022 has been especially challenging and presented many obstacles. The effects of climate change and the current crisis have become apparent. The villages and their residents have been pushed to their limits, experiencing severe drought, several brush and forest fires, the rising costs of living, and inflation. Those living in the Great Plain will have to reexamine their future prospects, while more and more of their concerns go unanswered. After having spent many of my school summer holidays in the Great Plain, a certain picture of village life had formed inside me. Finding solutions to the most pressing problems these communities are currently facing has become important to me personally. How will communities in the Great Plain survive, and what are their future prospects?

Capa Grand Prize Hungary 2021 winner

Éva SZOMBAT: I Want Orgasms, Not Roses

I was 29 when I bought my first ever vibrator. The fantasies of such an object had always excited me but I was too shy to realize them. In my serious relationship I overcame that obstacle. I played alone, we played together, I started to open up. I photographed, posted and even exhibited said first vibrator. I was terrified of what other people would think but my world didn’t turn upside down after all.

In my whole life I’ve been more interested in sexuality than I’ve admitted to myself. I believed it was bad manners for girls to be interested in it so openly. I believed so, until I’ve met people who would fearlessly talk about sex, masturbation, orgasms, the clitoris, porn and fantasies. It was liberating to belong to this group.

In 2017 I placed an ad. I was looking for people who would show their sex toys with pleasure. To my great surprise many answered my call. They also had a strong desire to talk about sexuality without shame. The contributors came from various walks of life: student, social worker, hairdresser, translator, artist, dominatrix, entrepreneur, employee, unemployed, freelancer, wife, girlfriend, single people, divorcee, mother-to-be, mother or grandma. In addition to taking pictures, I was conducting interviews which kept going deeper, in many cases dredging up serious traumas. I’ve learned something new after every session.

While working on this project I found my grandma’s memory book which she got during World War II. The messages in it, preparing one for life, often correspond with what my participants would tell me about their own inhibitions. These lines from many generations before served as pointers to girls. These implied that if you were born a woman you should be modest, obedient, bear the pain and the suffering. The participants, as well as I, internalized these thoughts too.

Through the years my relationship to sex changed a lot and with it the project itself. The object became less and less important, I was a lot more interested in the owner and their story. I was looking for means to get rid of the shame connected to sexuality, overcome societal conventions and break free from inherited behavioural patterns. The toys were the key to establishing honest communication.

Capa Grand Prize Hungary 2020 winner

Barnabás NEOGRÁDY-KISS: Double Bond

My sight is indescribable, cannot be visualized. Only those will know, those can understand it who have experienced it. Whatever I focus on, it will always be halved; if I look at the half of the half, that will be halved as well. I tried to conceive of photography as a study but I had to realize that I didn’t want this series to be an illustration of my vision. I had to dig a bit deeper to understand what this entails, what thoughts, connections, bonds form in my head. I tried to simplify a rather complex thing: the communication between pictures. Like when you try to filter out things that are interesting for you from a scene and then follow up on thoughts based on this filtering. Experiences, perceptions, half-thoughts, partial pictures, the big whole forming in our head. You see a round “O” when looking at a neon green floaty, I visualize a “C”-shaped half-green floaty. Following this train of thought, we’ll arrive at completely different conclusions; me at the letter “C,” you at the letter “O,” you end up with a UFO, I’m left with a boomerang.

I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a car.

The driver:

- So what do you see of this billboard?

- What billboard?

In my world, that billboard didn’t exist at that time. This made me realize that all those things we don’t see are still contributing to our lives.

Is anyone actually interested in what is beyond that mountain, behind your hands, under the water, behind our backs? To see everything all at once, whatever it is in front of me, that’s just a memory at this point. Thus the space I see is an image put together in my head with a time shift, like a mosaic. Do we all think in pictures? Do I recall things as a whole?

I’m lying on the king-sized bed at my mother’s place after my second surgery, watching television. There’s a movie on and there’s a scene where two characters are walking and having a conversation -- cut scene, and I only see a human face up close, and the character is seemingly listening to something, but I hear words, I hear someone telling a story. What the heck is going on with this movie? Are they showing us the character who isn’t even talking? Why is the other one still speaking if they aren’t on-screen? In exhaustion, I looked at the doorway, it was to the right of the TV, and I saw from my periphery that there were actually two people talking in the movie, then I looked back and saw one person again. What the fuck? I had no idea what was happening to me. I got scared, I studied it, I have accepted it by now.