The National Salon of Photography, held every five years, is not intended to act as a chronicler but designed as a personal selection from the photographic works of recent years. In earlier times, the art-related professions aspired to record events by publishing yearbooks and almanacs, while today it is generally assumed that ‘everything is available online’. Yet, the internet cannot replace an overview, nor can it highlight connections and values.
Many artists pursue the path of artistic self-expression, moving in different directions and at different speeds, each following their own ambitions. Every path has a right to exist, and each might well deserve to be presented. However, no exhibition venue in the world could provide sufficient space to accommodate them all. A decision therefore had to be made as to which direction to take when organising the present Salon exhibition. The more than one hundred photographers selected in this way approach their declared or implicit aim – building a coherent oeuvre in a constantly changing and evolving world – along many different routes. These routes may be defined and named in various ways, much like real roads, yet together they correspond broadly to the map of contemporary Hungarian photography.
The traditional broad avenue, viewed from a certain historical perspective, is formed by documentary photography aimed at social criticism.
In contrast to the documentarist approach, another route is intimate, diary-like photography, emphatically drawing its themes from everyday life.
A busy and widely travelled route is conceptual photography, where the initial idea – the concept – is often more important than the aesthetic form in which it is realised.
Many artists follow the path of manipulated image-making. Every image that rejects a reality considered unacceptable for any reason, or that finds insufficient the artistic possibilities inherent in the conventional arrangement of existing components readily challenges the boundary between reality and fiction, often crossing it, thus creating a quasi-reality shaped by the artist’s own vision.
In deliberate opposition to these tendencies, the exhibition also presents the work of archivists, who resist the inevitability of technological change and reject automated forms of image production.
A salon exhibition in 2026 that seeks to showcase current photographic tendencies cannot omit images produced partly or entirely with artificial intelligence (AI). At present, this is the most dynamically evolving direction of photography.
The selected exhibiting artists and the arc clearly outlined by the displayed works are underpinned and sustained by a large-scale undertaking: the album 300 Masters of Hungarian Photography, published by MMA Kiadó (Hungarian Academy of Arts Publisher) in conjunction with MMKI (Hungarian Academy of Arts Research Institute of Art Theory and Methodology), which comprises six hundred pictures by three hundred photographers and three hundred short essays. The exhibitors of this year’s Salon have been selected from among the contemporary artists included in this volume.
András Bán and Károly Kincses, curators of the exhibition