The Budapest Times
Cecília Bárdos in front of the house at 29-31 Retek utca in 1944 and in 2020. - Photo: Fortepan / Tivadar Lissák and Capa Center / Rockstar Photographers / Márton Mónus

‘75 years later’ – Article 3 of the Fortepan Weekly blog

The foster daughter of amateur photographer Tivadar Lissák in the 1940s and today

Fans of the Fortepan online repository of Hungarian photographs are sure to know the name and photos of Tivadar Lissák. The talented amateur photographer is one of the important sources of the archive, as a couple of years ago, thanks to his family’s generosity; the website could make more than 2000 of his images public. His images are regularly featured in Fortepan exhibitions, and when his foster daughter saw the pictures put on display in the Fény Street Market Hall in District II, she contacted Fortepan and completed the information it had about Lissák’s photos with interesting details.
People
7. February 2022 14:49

The Fortepan digital archive holds some 156,000 Hungarian photos taken from 1900 to 1990, and recently launched an English edition of its weekly blog Heti Fortepan. The latter, in Hungarian, has been running for a year in professional partnership with the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center. The richly illustrated series of articles can be freely published with due credit.

The English-language Weekly Fortepan will be a selection of the Heti Fortepan series launched in 2020. Every second Wednesday morning an article in English is being published at hetifortepan.capacenter.hu/en

Article 3 in Weekly Fortepan, “75 years later”, can be seen at https://hetifortepan.capacenter.hu/en/75-years-later/

The Fortepan digital photo archive collects and shares pre-1990 photographs under a Creative Commons licence, free for anyone to use – with attribution. The collection, which does not exist in physical form, was launched in 2010 and currently contains 156,000 photos. The archive, which is mainly supported by donations, is run by 10-15 editors working on a voluntary basis, and they try to decipher the content of the images on the FortePan megfejtések forum.

The collection is based on 5000 images collected since the 1980s from Budapest junk clearances. Over the past decade more than 700 donors have offered their photographs to the archive. At first it was mainly families but later photo documentation from companies and professional photographers also found their way onto Fortepan.

Fortepan volunteers simply digitise the images and return them to the donors. Fortepan is an edited archive, and about a third of the images received are uploaded, with editor Miklós Tamási looking for the “meaningful” ones.

The archive is named after the Fortepan negative film produced by the former Forte factory in Vác, which was very popular in Hungary. The blog is edited by Tamási and István Virágvölgyi, curator of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center.

 

Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center

Nagymező utca 8, District VI, Budapest

Website: https://capacenter.hu/en/

Email: info@capacenter.hu

Tel.: (06-1) 413-1310

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