The Hungarian Revolution 1956 - Nagy Gyula.

Nagy Gyula was born in Pápa, Hungary, in 1922 and moved to Budapest after the Second World War. In 1951 he joined the MÁV Design Institute as an assistant structural designer, remaining with the organisation until his retirement. By 1956 he was already an active amateur photographer and regularly carried more than one camera. During the 1960s he completed his professional photography qualification and subsequently worked as a technical photographer and became head of the institute’s photographic laboratory. He died in 1991.

The Hungarian Revolution began in Budapest on 23 October 1956, initially through student demonstrations calling for political reform, greater national independence and changes to Hungary’s Soviet backed communist system. The protests developed rapidly into an armed uprising involving civilians, revolutionary groups, Hungarian military personnel, state security forces and Soviet troops. Imre Nagy returned as prime minister and announced political reforms, a multiparty system and Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Soviet forces launched a major military intervention on 4 November, using tanks, artillery and infantry to regain control of Budapest and suppress organised resistance. Nagy was later arrested and executed in 1958.

Nagy photographed events in Budapest from the morning of 24 October through the following weeks, using both his own camera and a camera belonging to his workplace. His surviving negatives comprise approximately forty rolls of 35mm film and more than 1,000 exposures. They record demonstrations and crowds, armed revolutionaries, Soviet tanks and armoured vehicles, damaged buildings, wrecked public transport, political notices, streets after fighting and civilians moving through the city. On 2 November he received written authorisation from National Guard commander Béla Király to photograph the activities of the National Guard. After the Soviet intervention Nagy continued photographing, including from the air raid shelter of his Budapest building, and later recorded the women’s demonstration at Heroes’ Square on 4 December and gatherings at Kálvin Square on 5 December. The negatives survived a police search of his home in June 1957 and were retained by his family. Fortepan later received the surviving material and published a sequence of 560 photographs from his 1956 work, while examples of his photographs are also held in Hungarian museum and archival collections.

Fortepan

Music
Interstice of Sound - DEX 1200

Camera is on:
Thank you for all your support.

The photographs featured in this video are from the Nagy Gyula collection held by Fortepan. Images are reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence (CC BY-SA 3.0). Image credit: FOTO:FORTEPAN / Nagy Gyula. Individual photographs remain subject to the licensing and attribution information provided with their respective Fortepan records.

#photography #hungarianhistory #hungarian #hungary #1956 #budapest #revolution #uprising #documentaryphotography #photojournalism #streetphotography #historicalphotography #photographyhistory #coldwarhistory #sovietunion #20thcentury #blackandwhitephotography