Fortepan is the biggest archive of photographs in Hungary. It was named after the Fortepan brand of negative film manufactured by the former Forte factory in Vác. The archive contains photographs dating, for the most part, from between 1900 and 1990, of which around 110,000 are available online, from where they can be downloaded and used freely, provided that the source is indicated.

The publicly available photos are covered (as per Fortepan’s digital terms and conditions) under a Creative Commons license. The number of photographs is growing continuously as new pictures are submitted and the existing ones are digitalised. Ákos Szepessy, Miklós Tamási and their friends have spent around 20 years collecting and, later on, publishing these old, mostly amateur, snapshots, many of which were found discarded on Budapest’s official ‘junk days’, with many family and other photo collections being donated since. Our tableau exhibition is a selection from the archive showing landscapes both recent and older from Rome and elsewhere in Italy, as well as images with a Hungarian connection, such as Hungarian tourists visiting Saint Peter’s Square and a portrait of an elderly Lajos Kossuth taken in Turin.

Admission is free of charge.

Bridging Europe festival is the joint production of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Müpa Budapest.