A year-long season in Budapest connects the medium’s origins with contemporary questions of identity, memory and power.
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
Mai Manó House is marking the bicentenary of photography by dedicating an entire season to French photographic culture for the first time in its history. Presented under the title Two Centuries of French Light, the programme forms part of an international commemoration of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s pioneering experiments and will continue until September 2027.
Created in cooperation with the French Institute, the season encompasses 26 projects examining photography’s historical development and contemporary transformation. Its programme brings together figures such as Émile Zola, Nora Dumas, René Maltête, Jeanloup Sieff, André Kertész, Brassaï and Janine Niépce, while the collective exhibition Hexagon introduces present-day French perspectives.
One of the three inaugural exhibitions reveals an unfamiliar dimension of Émile Zola. The celebrated novelist began taking photographs at the age of 48, established laboratories in his homes and produced more than 2,000 glass-plate negatives. Zola, the Writer of Light presents intimate images of his relatives, friends and domestic surroundings, exposing a visual practice considerably more personal than his public literary identity.
The programme also restores attention to Nora Dumas, born Telkes Nóra in Budapest, whose archive was believed lost for decades before material resurfaced unexpectedly at an American flea market. Her photographs of agricultural labor, children, rural communities and the human body connect social documentation with the humanist tradition that shaped interwar photography in France.
A third exhibition, Transanatolia, presents work created by French photographer Mathias Depardon over five years in Turkey. By focusing on peripheral regions and contested boundaries, the series explores how modernization, historical memory, geography and political authority coexist within a changing national identity.
Together, the exhibitions show that photography has never functioned merely as a mechanical record of visible reality. From Zola’s private interiors to Dumas’s rural subjects and Depardon’s borderlands, the camera selects, interprets and preserves. Two centuries after its emergence, the medium remains suspended between evidence and imagination—a tension made even more consequential by digital manipulation and artificial intelligence.
Every photograph preserves a moment while changing the way it will be remembered.