Fashionably derelict
Images from Budapest's most famous ruin bar and its neighborhood... mostly in black and white.
The best opportunity to point your lens at new sights is when you walk the city with friends from abroad. Sunday evening found us in the Ghetto area of Budapest, which has a turbulent and tragic legacy, and a very colorful present. Among other things, it's home to the most famous ruin bar in the city, maybe in all of Europe, called "Szimpla".
I was looking to take black-and-white "ambient" photographs for my company's website: these are images of unusual subjects, often street art, stripped of the context so they can be used for many purposes. A ruin bar, or rather an entire party district, fashioning itself as an artistic environment, is a treasure chest for these images.
The age of the Renaissance gave us back our fascination for the antique; but the antique often comes in ruins, so ruins are often connected to beauty. When you go "urbex", you actually look for the aesthetic in the derelict. The same goes for the ruin bars.
This photo set also refers back to another renaissance trope, "chiaroscuro", the interplay between light and dark, which was obviously offered by the venues: these photos were taken after dark, in low light, sometimes focusing on sparse light sources.
The first six photos are from Szimpla. The street art on the 9th image comes from an artist with an Instagram handle "v.o1.d", the 12th image is a mockery of Banksy (the actual label is naughtier). The last image shows a character called "MZ/X", an old man from the future in an iconic Hungarian cartoon from the 70s, early 80s.
