Digital archive
Gábor Barka (1954–2021), technical photographer, obtained his photographer’s qualification at the Industrial Vocational Training Institute No. 5, Práter Street, between 1974 and 1976. His practical training took place at the Hungarian Film Laboratory, Hungarian Television and Fotó Optika. Soon after qualifying as a photographer, he joined the photographic team of the National Inspectorate for Monuments and Sites, where professional building photography became his main profile, but he also became acquainted with the problems of art photography when he moved to the Hungarian Museum of Architecture, which was maintained by the office. In addition to his official commissions, he also had several private commissions, making pictures for the Landscapes, Ages, Museums series, the Sík publishing house’s City Hall series and several architectural topographies, but he also took pictures for scientific documentation of monuments. Until 2003, his pictures were made exclusively in analogue, working on large 6×7 and 6×9 colour and black and white negatives and colour slides, mostly with the Linhof technique. This does not refer specifically to Linhof cameras, but to the principles of the technical camera
His legacy includes a large number of negatives and colour slides of monuments and publications taken between 1979 and 2003. A selection of these is now published, some of which were on display in elaborate form at Gábor Barka’s exhibition at FUGA last year. (I loved my profession! The Last 40 years of the Photography Historic Architecture through the ouevre of Gábor Barka, 9 July – 6 August 2021)
The material is arranged in topographical order on the map, with the date of production or publication of each image indicated where known.
Link to the map:
Technical features: the images are all full size scans of the original negative or slide, made for archival purposes only, not cropped, prepared for publication. Due to the peculiarities of analogue photography, a single shot may be repeated several times with different aperture and time settings, often undetectable due to the smoothing effects of scanning, but may be repeated with the same angle and setting.
Art historian expert: Zoltán Fehérvári
The digitisation work was commissioned by FUGA Budapest Architecture Centre and supported by the National Cultural Fund.
