Landscapes

Outdoor photographs recording the appearance of towns and villages, buildings and the natural environment can be founf in this unit. They are stored according to the cities' names in strict alphabetical order. The earliest pieces are the works of Ede Heidenhaus, photos of cities along the line of the Danube (Pest-Buda, Dévény, Pozsony, Esztergom) at the end of the 1850's.

In 1869 Amand Helm from Vienna made a series of photos of the villages and towns along the line of the Danube. His "Donau-Album" is a nice, early piece of our collection.

From the 1870's the number of cityscape photos is increasing. The first series of the almost 700 sere cityscape photos were made for the World Expo of 1873 in Vienna.

Photos depicting Kolozsvár and its environs by Ferenc Veress and pictures of the Tátra by Károly Divald can be found in the collection. Our first panorama picture pieced together from several separate parts is from the middle of the 1870's. It is easy to date because the building Margit bridge is clearly visible in the background. The so-called joint panorama picture was fashionable for a long time. The nicest piece of the genre is Ferenc Kozmata's picture of the Pest-Buda sides of the city. These photos were of ornate design, could be opened in the fashion of leporellos and were copied by photomechanical multiplication process.

A special part of this unit are György Klösz's pictures of Hungarian castles from the end of the 19th century. The glass-sheet negatives - of which there are almost 400- feature the castles and their parks.

At the beginning of the 1910's Károly Divald's son of the same name teamed up with György Monostory photographed the historical Hungary's most important places and made a series of postcards of it.

Photos depicting memorial signs, memorials, cemeteries, public sculptures, and homes of famous people are also part of this collection.

The amount and quality of pictures made of foreign cities is varying. Many pictures were made of those cities and bath resorts that were fancied by Hungarians (Vienna, Paris, Roma, Karlsbad). These pictures are most of the time works of local photographers; pictures intended for tourists, depicting the well-known sights, of good quality, often multiplied by photomechanical progress. From the beginning of the 20th century, pictures of vacations or of trips to foreign countries by Hungarian photographers are also present in the collection.

The negative and colored slides collection - containing more than 110 thousand pictures - made by the Fine Arts Foundation from 1960 to the middle of the 1980's for the purpose of publishing postcards became part of the collection in 1999. Its value in historical documentation is immeasurable as it contains pictures of even the smallest villages, on which one can follow the changes in the appearance of the villages.