[Collage with self-portrait, from Budapest Diary]

In the 1950s, László Káldor would contribute designs to a popular Hungarian travel guide. By comparison, his visual compendium of Budapest, assembled two decades earlier, is a tourist’s nightmare. Here, Káldor omits the hits; instead of highlighting local landmarks and historic sites, he trains his camera on interstitial spaces. His vertiginous views of sidewalks and stairwells frame the old city anew, while scenes of labor and construction conjure an ongoing process of industrialization. These pages from Káldor's urban diary show snatches of street life in a city of rising rebar and rapid traffic, transforming from one page to the next.


Káldor studied interior and furniture design at Hungary’s School of the Applied Arts before turning to graphic design in the 1930s. Today, he is best remembered for his energetic and colorful poster compositions from the postwar period. This unpublished project—one of his earliest surviving endeavors—speaks to the central role of the camera in his practice. Though he never identified as a photographer, he was attuned to contemporary trends in the field, and here follows the New Vision taste for perspectival play. But to craft these dynamic scenes of the city in flux, his photographs served as jumping-off points, from which all manner of imaginative interventions sprang. To each, he added bright flourishes of paint, reimagining what lay beyond the picture’s edge. In his collage compositions, lumber beams burst beyond their frames, and cobblestones stretch into a bold blue lattice; a pedestrian sprouts a stylized new shadow, and the posters lining a sidewalk unspool as if from a canister of film. With this last sly, synthetic gesture, Káldor rolls all his tools into one. Photography, that pencil of nature, keeps company with brushes and pens in his design studio. Together, they sketch out a new itinerary through this modern city still in the making.