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King of my castle

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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View all images ↓

Dates

2016 - Ongoing
Author

Marton Magocsi
Topics Documentary
Location Hungary

Contemporary images on found medium seeking out collective experiences of change and non-change in an insular Eastern European country.

All families are full of legends.

A few of them are true, many of them are based in truth, and most are just legends.

Nevertheless, in recent years, I have felt our legends’ settings, my parents' and grandparents' experiences come back to life around me. It’s as if I had grown up with the illusion that these stories of living with repression and hate would be things of the past.

It all seemed very surreal.

To document this perceived mix of the past and present, I turned to using long-expired film, exposing the found medium to the images of own life and of present day Hungary I see working as a photojournalist. The result is a mix of reality as recorded by the camera, distortion by the whims of the medium, and my own arbitrary narrative, not confined by my journalistic need to record a perceived truth, a kind of created evidence. The look and feel of the images are decades old, yet the content is very contemporary.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Nagykónyi, Playground, 2016 My first experience of the West in the middle of the eighties was how much better playgrounds in Hamburg were. My parent's most vivid memory of that trip was the no-man's land between East and West Germany.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Lyukóvölgy, Flight, 2017 They told us they were trying to get the pickup out of the snow to take a woman to a mothers' home to escape from her abusive husband. Family legend has it that my grandfather had my mother's family all set up to flee to Austria after 1956, but my aunt had pneumonia and he refused to travel on the back of a truck with a sick child.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Gun, 1940s My father's grandfather made this for him, and my father transformed it for me at the end of the eighties to be Winetou's Silberbüchse, with a plastic tube for the long barrel and thumbtacks for the silver studs on the butt.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Budapest, BMW, 2017 These garages are not nice in the Buda Hills, but they serve their purpose. It was also not nice, that my grandfather had his car confiscated for military purposes during the Second World War. But at least he could hide his life in a small shack and it wasn’t confiscated for military purposes.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Eskisehir, Birthday, 2008 I never once saw my mother and father argue as I grew up. I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t know if this had anything to do with how I screwed up my relationships in my teenage years and twenties. I do know that I blamed them for all my misery back then.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Pakozd, Hussar, 2018 This oversized tin Hussar stands on the way to the town where my grandfather completed secondary school. My family has been intelligentsia for at least three generations. My mother's father was the seventh child of a Schwabian shoemaker, he climbed to become a civil engineer with only his brains between the two world wars.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Miskolc, Heavy Industry, 2017 Heavy industry is now mostly defunct under market conditions in Miskolc. My mother's father, a civil engineer, spent his weekdays living and working in Miskolc after the Second World War building Communist heavy industry.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Biharkeresztes, Trucks, 2017 They took a rest close to the Romanian border on the road between east and west. One of my grandmothers was Austrian. Our family always had a part living in the West with connections and roots in the East, and a part living in the East with connections and roots in the West.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Ring with Initials, 1930s I never met my father's father. He gave me his initialed ring before my wedding, to use as raw gold for our wedding rings. The lucky middle class that we are, we didn't have to, so this out-of-focus photograph is not all that my father has left of his father's ring.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Budapest, 1956, 2017 My father was a child during the 1956 revolution and when his father was jailed afterwards. He was a judge in Kecskemét, and president of the revolutionary committee of the county. When I am assigned to take photos of court proceedings there, I always put a flower under my grandfather's memorial plaque in the courthouse.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Sukoró, Neighbour, 2017 My parents' summer house is where I can go to relax and feel like a child again, unless the neighbour starts renovation of his pool at six in the morning on Sunday. When my father and my mother bought the small village house in the eighties, it was surrounded by vineyards, and they would come here for what pundits call internal emigration.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Budapest, 1989, 2017 We spent two and a half years in the United States when communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, my parents followed the events on CNN with perplexed hopefulness. I have no memories of the events at home, the only image burned into my mind is that of the dead Ceausescu, even though my parents told me not to look.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Letter to America, 1980s My best friend and I exchanged regular letters during my family's two and a half year stay in the United States from 1989 to 1991.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Bag, Wood Thief, 2017 I had great expectations when we moved to the United States from then still socialist Hungary in 1989: great playgrounds (like in Hamburg!) for example and I was really hoping my parents would be able to afford buying a video camera and my best friend and I could shoot the LEGO movie we had been planning for years. My parents had great expectations when we moved back to then no longer socialist Hungary in 1991.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Budapest, Winner, 2017 When my parents and their friends organised competitions for the kids, they always created so many categories that everyone would get a medal and could feel like a winner. I was really disappointed with second place in my first real competition.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Derecske, Football, 2017 It's as if they knew the future in Derecske when they constructed this giant concrete football. My grandmother was always angry at my father and grandfather in when they snuck away to football matches in the sixties.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Vistula Spit, End of the World, 2018 A light fence and a stop sign is all that keeps people from crossing over to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad from Poland.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Grandparents with Bullet Hole, 1940s My Schwabian grandfather and my Austrian grandmother relax on a floating platform on presumably Lake Balaton in the first half of the 1940s. The hole in the picture also originates from later in the same decade. According to the version of the story passed down to me, a Russian soldier's bullet hit it as my grandmother was trying to prevent him from plundering their home.

© Marton Magocsi - Image from the King of my castle photography project

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Hamburg, Raft, 2018 A motorized rubber boat carries tourists on a harbour tour in Hamburg, Germany. My uncle arrived here at the end of the 1970s after waiting for five years to see his son again - the authorities in Communist Hungary had not allowed him to leave the country because they said his wife and son had defected. In the eighties, it seemed every family had an uncle in the West, usually Canada. Our Canadian uncle was in Hamburg, Germany, and legend has it we had some distant relatives in Florida who left in 1956.

King of my castle by Marton Magocsi