Máté Bartha combines social documentary photography with a pure aesthetic vision and spontaneity with staged situations in his practice. This duality applies in his well-known series, Non-relevant, an ongoing street photography project that resulted in the publication of Bartha’s first photo-book, Common Nature in 2014. The project builds on everyday moments, portraits, and object trouvés captured on the streets of the Hungarian capital’s outer districts and shows the ambivalences and absurdities of our contemporary society and urban existence, as well as their profound incompatibility. Looking at these mirrors of a distorted reality, it is difficult to identify the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of these images. Are these really happening on the streets of Budapest or are these illusory, surprising, unsettling, dream-like compositions of our subconscious instead visual tricks of our mind? Máté Bartha took his first masters degree in Photography at MOME in 2011. His interest in social documentary lead him to continue his studies and to complete in 2018 a Master Degree in Directing Documentary Film at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest. In 2017, he was selected to be one of the awardees of the Capa Photography Fellowship for his series First Contact, which presents photos that report from military-themed camps for adolescents. He exhibited in Budapest, Paris, Bucharest, Istanbul, Ulm, and Cologne.
34., from the series Nature, 2014
7., from the series Nature, 2014
Untitled, from the series Half the Man, 2014
Untitled, from the series Half the Man, 2014