(Architect and photographer) Kerényi Zoltán has a continuous interest with the past and all things antique. Kerenyi being based in Budapest, the artist would usually walk along the city streets, wondering what people used to do then when they hang around long-standing landmarks, structures, and buildings. So, he decided to reimagine by superimposing old shots and portraits of people against his own contemporary photographs. Taken from the public archive of Fortepan, Kerényi lets us time travel with his series Ablak a múltra / Windows to the past.

He quotes that motivation was he reason he’s interested in the past, it’s nice to think about those people who were walking the same streets as we do, just a hundred years ago. And showing it the way he did in this project is, he thinks, the best way. It’s also related to Zoltan’s original profession, architecture, as the connection between the past and present pictures are the buildings, the streets. There are a lot of war-time archive photos out there, but he intentionally avoided those (have just a few out of the 500 he created in 5 years) and concentrated on the happy moments of those bygone people.

Zoltan quotes that “Budapest was a perfect location for this project, as most of the inner city was built a century ago, and those buildings are still standing despite two world wars, revolutions…
If I could time-travel, I’d go back to around 1900, to see all those constructions and the vivid life of the city, which was among the foremost metropolitan centres of the world”.

I believe similarly to the photographer himself , that the biggest challenge is always to find the exact same position as the old photographer, to fit the perspective perfectly and that you have to examine every little detail. Zoltan quotes that finding the place was not that big of a deal, as he knows Budapest quite well. As well as in the beginning, he made easy location pictures, and as time went by, a lot of people helped Fortepan to add locations to a lot of pictures, making it searchable by city, street, even house number. So whenever Zoltan had a trip to a new location, he could search for archive photos in advance. But of course, there were photos without location tags and was only my genius to find the place.