Galga River Valley Lives!

Galga River-Valley Lives!

Sunday, March 1st - 3 to 6pm

Join us for the opening reception of this joyful and pensive collection of photographs of the Galga River-Valley with photographer Sándor Gulyás.

Sándor Gulyás: "I believe that the greatest significance of this collection is that the photographs give an age imprint on the 21st century population of the Galga river-valley. The external and internal values, clothing, and signs of their everyday living environment appear - professions, objects, and furnishings. "

Landscapes, village pictures:

The photographs present the characteristics of the typical settlements along the Galga River photographed from unique angles that help to identify the given place, referring to both local landscape and buildings.

Events:

Photos of events include village days, harvest parades, various religious events, e.g. worship, procession, blessing of bread, festive gatherings. Social events, e.g. exhibition openings, national holiday commemorations. Among these, quite a few images show the participants in regional folk costume.

Photo portraits of local residents:

The images of the local residents were made based on local recommendations on where to look. This means that local people drew Gulyás' attention to the subjects he photographed. Although many of the pictures are staged, the people in them are in their natural environment, taking part in regular activities.

Folk music and songs from Galgamente, Hungary: Magnó - 01884B | Folk Music | Hungaricana

About the photographer:

He once trained as a photojournalist, studying and obtaining a professional degree at MTI Foto in the early 1980s, but at that time the photography community had become so saturated that he did not pursue a career in the field. He went down a different career path in flight planning, first as a crew planning officer, then a team leader, and then a crew planning manager. Today, he is retired, and actively working to expand his collection, and explore other Hungarian regions.

During his long time in air traffic planning, he traveled the world, but as he did, he increasingly found true beauty in the landscapes of Hungary and loved to show others how he found his homeland to be so beautiful. This gave him the idea in 2012 to photograph one of Hungary's regions in depth. Since at that time he was still actively working, he had to find an easily reachable area, so he chose the Galga River-valleyc near Budapest. The choice was also helped by the fact that he grew up near this region, in Veresegyház, until the age of 11.