Photographer Sándor Kereki reveals 'Budapest in the 70's from a boy’s perspective'

Given a camera by his father at the age of 16, Sándor Kereki spent the next decade wandering the streets of the Hungarian capital.

He took thousands of shots along his travels and today many of them are on show in in a new exhibition at the Robert Capa Centre in Budapest.

Kereki's collection consists of 7,000 exposed negatives. Every photograph on display is intriguing, evokes memories, and in some cases people have recognised themselves or a relative.

Kereki put down his camera in the early eighties and uploaded some 1,800 images to a digital photo archive named Fortepan in 2021. Many visitors will recognise the 6th and 7th districts, where he captured everyday moments.

Describing his work and the situations he encountered, Kereki says, "the street is the street. You find something interesting, and then you go home and look at it and it turns out it's not that interesting. So there was no plan, the only plan was that I tried not to interfere."

"I have never done it in such a touching way, I was lucky, the lighting was good, I ran into it and I was lucky to see it, because it happened on the street, but you don't see something like that everywhere."

The exhibition at the Robert Capa Centre in Budapest is open until 4 February 2024.