The World Press Photo exhibition represents a novelty this year, not only because of its new location. As of 2018, the internationally highly regarded exhibition awaits visitors in the Hungarian National Museum, on view this year from September 21-October 23. The museum is open extended hours every Friday and Saturday, 10:00-20:00 o’clock, and on the last day of the exhibition.

For decades documentary photographs of the year’s events were on public view in the Ethnographic Museum. This year, however, due to the museum’s change of location, the World Press Photo moved its headquarters from the former judiciary building to the symbolic palace of Hungarian history and memory, the Hungarian National Museum. 

The National Museum’s collection and its exhibition programs to date reinforce the World Press Photo’s message. The institution’s photography archive, the Historical Photographs Gallery, houses one of the most significant collections in the country. The museum has been collecting visual documentation of Hungarian and general history, life-style, and visual culture since the mid 19th century. The first acquisition was a photograph album of Pál Rosti’s unusual photographs of Central and South America, donated to the museum in 1858. Ever since, the Historical Photographs Gallery continues to be enriched with series of photographs that capture the world’s and our own country’s relationships, events, transitions of eras and/or their changes that are regularly on view through Budapest and international traveling exhibitions.
The World Press Photo viewing public is at the same time also treated to a new experience this year, thanks to digital media innovations. Winners of the World Press Photo “Digital Storytelling” category will be introduced for the first time in Hungary. Continuous reel films during the exhibition provide an ongoing movie experience, along with touch-screen multimedia to enhance the visitor’s interaction. The World Press Photo exhibit in the National Museum not only opens a window to the world through the most important documentary photographs and films of the previous year but also offers an opportunity for their interpretation.

At the same time, the significance of the exhibition is more than merely an exceptional visual experience whereby the viewer can better appreciate events taking place in the world through the apparent captured images. An international jury in Amsterdam selected the 134 pictures in the exhibition from among 73,044 photographs. This sizeable photographic material was submitted in eight different categories by 4548 photographers from 125 countries. The annual exhibition is an important part of international and Hungarian cultural life: in 45 countries of the world, over four million people visit the exhibition in 100 locations. The World Press Photo Exhibition has been held in Budapest for 41 years, organized for the past 28 years by Herald Europa coordinating director Tamás Révész, who was several times earlier a member of the jury as well as an award winner of the competition.

The current exhibition again calls on our attention and openness to the events of the world, it documents various aspects of the realities of our lives. Through the values and twists and turns of Hungarian history the wider audience can become simultaneously acquainted with the broader challenges and problems of our own era, as well as the lives of other peoples.
The accompanying exhibit, “naturArt–25 Years of the Most Beautiful Nature Photographs” intends to call attention to our treasured environment, in need of protection.