Definite Moment – Onceuponacity, The joint exhibition of MODEM and the Déri Museum
The exhibition was the first public display of the Photo Gallery, which has been formed into a separate collection over the last ten years by combining the growing stock of photographic negatives from the museum’s work from 1907 onwards and the positive images from the historical archives, which have been enriched from the point of view of urban and family history and ethnography.
Selected by the curators, the 90 photos on display showcase the collection by bringing together the most powerful illustrations of urban history. In the other part of the exhibition, the familiar foreign perspective of the inhabitants of the city is complemented by the intuitively foreign perspective of contemporary artists, as six contemporary artists, who have already dealt with photographic memory in their works, created artworks for this occasion by reflecting on images selected from the collection.
The moment when I become certain about the selection of a picture is quite simple. If I expressed it sentimentally – and it would be the simplest way for sure –, this feeling is exactly as unambiguous as when you realize that you are in love. These types of certainties have one determining moment. If we go beyond the answers, we can get to a deeper, truer layer of images.
Millions of photographs are preserved in different archives, museums, libraries and private collection, family archives. In addition to fine details of twentieth-century history, experiences of everyday life, culture, the canon of contemporary aesthetics, these warehouses store may great images and artists. We need to take care of the 20th century archives now. In 2022, I made this slideshow of 99 images for the MODEM exhibition from the Déri Museum's collection of hundreds of thousands of digitized photographs.