Previous Exhibitions

Dóra Maurer:

"Fényelvtan" [Light-syntax]. On the photogram

20. September - 5. October 2001.

The presentation of Dóra Maurer's book
"Fényelvtan" [Light-syntax]. On the photogram
at 18:00 on 20. September 2001.
in the C3 Gallery
1014 Budapest, Országház u. 9.

An event organised jointly by the Hungarian Museum of Photography and the C3 Centre for Culture & Communication

László Beke, art historian, will say a few words of appreciation about the work, which has been published as the 22nd volume of the series entitled A magyar fotográfia történetéből [from the history of Hungarian photography].

On the event of the book presentation a number of the photograms published in the book will be exhibited in the C3 Centre exhibition hall.

The exhibition may be seen until 5th October 2001, on weekdays between 12:00-20:00.

The author of the book, Dóra Maurer - who's career has been accompanied by innumerable creative experiments with light and light-sensitive materials - defines the subject of her book in the following way: "A photogram is a picture created – usually of the shadows of objects –without a camera or negative, only with light, light-sensitive materials and the chemicals that develop the changes taking place in them. The photogram first appeared nearly eighty years ago as an open genre in the avant-garde art of the 1920s that links painting and photography and which even appears in avant-garde films." The aim of the book is to give a comprehensive picture of a lesser-known chapter of universal art history, so presenting the history and theory of the photogram. The chapter entitled Töredék a fotogramról [Fragment on the photogram] discusses the history of the genre of the photogram from the invention of photography up until the 1940s, with special emphasis on the thoughts on light of Moholy-Nagy and his photogram works. The chapter on the Hungarian history of the photogram is a piece of basic research from the point of view of the period between the 1920s up to the present day. She deems the summarising from an art history point of view of the large number of rarely or not at all published works to be exceptionally important. The volume is supplemented with documents, a selected bibliography, the biographies of the artists whose works appear in the book and also an explanation of the technical terms used in connection with photogram making, so adapting to the series on Hungarian photography that it is a part of.

The publication of the book was sponsored by the National Cultural Fund Program, the Budapest Fine Arts Fund, the Hungart Copyright Protection Office, the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts and the Esztergom Leisure Centre.