Péter Tímár
2013., www.timarpeter.hu
Born 23 August 1948 in Ajka. He received his diploma from Eötvös József High School in Budapest, then completed his studies between 1967-72 at the Architectural Faculty of the Budapest Technical University. Already as a university student, he participated in photo exhibitions. Until 1979, he worked as an architect at the Planning Development and Standard Type Design Institute, while he also became a member of the Hungarian Association of Photographers and the Art Foundation. Between 1979 and 2010, he was an art teacher in the Photography Department of the Vocational High School of Fine and Applied Arts, as well as being its director until 2007. Between 2009-11 he taught in the Photography Department of the Kaposvár University, and currently teaches at the Budapest Communications and Business School (BKUF).
Tímár has continuously engaged in the modernisation of photography training in Hungary: he played a part in the inauguration of photography training on the academy level in Hungary, and he worked up, and over a long period maintained the professional programme and examination requirements of high school training.
During his own photographic career, he first produced montages and collages, and then hand-coloured photographs, in which it was the fine art approach of photography that interested him. It was later the documentary power of the photograph that captivated him. His shocking documentation of the consummative act, not disguising the piety, that he produced at the Budapest Mortuary Institute, comes from this period. He also produced an expansive series on tattooed inmates of prisons and reformatories in Hungary. At his initiative – his conceived hypothesis, and based on an almost sociographic visual exploration – the Hungarian Prison Service launched a research programme to explore the relationship between tattooed symbols and criminal character.
Alongside his teaching, for years he worked for Magyar Szemle (Hungarian Review), the periodical of the Foreign Ministry distributed abroad, as a reporter and photo editor. Since 1991, he is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the photography journal, Fotóművészet (Photo Art).
He later turned to city and landscape photography, taking many aerial shots. His album, Budapest plein air, was published from these photographs in 1998.
He currently continues to regularly photograph studio portraits and nudes, and anything from our living and lifeless world that carries significance for him.
His oeuvre was recognised in 1996 with the Balogh Rudolf Award.
He has taken part in group exhibitions in many places worldwide – USA, Australia, Switzerland, The Netherlands, etc.; his photographs appear in albums and publications of defining international photo history and photographic art.
A portion of his photographs are held in the Elysée Museum in Lausanne, in the Contemporary Photo Archive of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Hungarian Museum of Photography in Kecskemét, and in the Körmendi-Csák Collection of 20th Century Hungarian Photography.
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