Oeuvre
Best of — the reference gallery
A wide selection from the archive: portraits, commissioned work, personal picture stories, urban observations, art series and cultural moments from 1999 to today.
Fine Art Photography · Since 1999
Hungarian Fine Art Photographer · Vienna / Budapest / New York
Artist statement
“Photography, for me, is the discipline of seeing a person before the world tells you who they are.”
Oeuvre
A wide selection from the archive: portraits, commissioned work, personal picture stories, urban observations, art series and cultural moments from 1999 to today.
About me
Who I am, where I come from, and what I have been looking for through the lens for twenty-five years.
I was born in Budapest in 1979 and I have been photographing since 1999 — more than half my life. Today I live and work in Vienna, with one foot always in Budapest. If you ask what my work is about, I would say: people at their truest. Women rebuilding themselves after illness. Fathers learning a new kind of strength. The memory of 1956. Dancers between discipline and freedom. A lone figure crossing a New York street at dusk.
My road was anything but straight. I studied engineering, then founded the photo studio of the Hungarian Defence Forces — that is where I learned to work when the stakes are real. New York gave me four wild years: exhibitions, books, studies at the New York Institute of Photography. Since 2018 I have been an OM SYSTEM Ambassador, and from 2020 I co-founded and curated the digital Rege Gallery in Tihany, where we played with The Frame, NFTs and AI long before it was fashionable to ask what images are becoming.
There is one thing I never put in a CV, and it is probably the most important. Around 2013 I went to Greece to rest. First day, I took my rollerblades down to the sea and, for once, left the protective gear behind. There was gravel before a bend, I was going fast, and I went into a wall. My elbow was shattered, my face was torn open by my own sunglasses, and I could not see out of one eye.
What happened next still surprises me: a huge calm came over me and the army training simply switched on. Shirt off, arm tied up, find where the blood is coming from, apply pressure, flag down a motorbike. In the hospital a doctor who had already worked twenty-four hours decided to stay with me. We talked all night in a language neither of us spoke well.
Lying on that bed, not knowing whether I would keep my sight, I understood something. I had done a great many things — photographer, marketer, event organiser, community builder — and I had not truly found my place in any of them. It was position-collecting, not a life. So I made a deal with myself: if I survive this, I do photography. Everything you see on this site comes from that night.
These days much of my energy goes into community: portrait fundraisers for the Vienna Hungarian School, and the free Be Smart Kids Club I started for Hungarian-speaking children. Photography gave me everything — this is how I give some of it back.
Publications
Three interdisciplinary books, each made together with writers, doctors and the people in the pictures. Open one for its full story and gallery.
This book grew out of the Awakening project, and in a way it is the more intimate half of it. Twelve women who lived through gynaecological cancer, fifteen pictures of their stories, and their own words alongside.
ISBN 978-963-12-8663-2Poems you can look at. With Vincent & Vincent, Olga Kovács and Péter Telekes we reinterpreted verse through photography and moving image — a multi-sensory experiment among friends that somehow ended up between two covers.
ISBN 2310005245015Nine transitions of a woman's life, with Miklós Vámos's words and Éva Lénárt's stories beside my portraits. Of everything I have ever printed, this may be the gentlest.
ISBN 978-615-00-1829-41999 — 2027
Twenty exhibitions between 2014 and 2027, from Budapest and New York to Vienna and Munich. Each has its own page with the story behind it and its images.
Stefánia Palace, Budapest
This was my first real statement, and I still stand by every word of it. Thirty-one women, no retouching, no tricks, no digital surgery. I wanted to show that a face doesn't need correcting to be beautiful…
Millenáris Velodrom, Budapest
Pin-up usually gets treated as nostalgia, or worse, as a costume you rent for an afternoon. I never saw it that way. For me it was always attitude — that playful, knowing confidence a woman has when she is…
Hungarian House, New York
New York changed the way I see. Not the way I shoot — the way I see. I photographed Hungarian women who had chosen that city as their own, and what fascinated me was how identity travels: how you can carry…
Stefánia Palace, Budapest
One woman is never just one woman. That was the whole starting point. I wanted to photograph the entire emotional spectrum — the distance between what the world expects of you and what you actually see in…
Bálna, Budapest
The most personal one. When my own world turned upside down, I did the only thing I know how to do: I picked up a camera and pointed it at other men standing in the same storm.
Hungarian House, New York
In New York I met people who carried 1956 in their pockets. Literally: photographs, a key, a christening spoon — the one object they grabbed on the way out. We spent months driving around New York State,…
Travelling project, Hungary
A game between friends that got beautifully out of hand. Vincent & Vincent wrote, Olga and Péter performed, I photographed, and somewhere in the middle it turned into a travelling show that kept reinventing…
Stefánia Palota, Budapest · Noszvaj · Veszprém
The project closest to my heart, and the hardest one to talk about without a lump in my throat. Women living after gynaecological cancer, photographed with their scars — not as wounds, but as proof of…
Book & exhibition project
Nine transitions every woman passes through — puberty, motherhood, menopause, ageing, all the stations the fashion world pretends do not exist. Miklós Vámos wrote alongside the pictures, and somewhere along…
Long Island, New York
Ballerinas fascinated me not on stage but off it. On rooftops, on crosswalks, in the two seconds before a taxi horn. Everything they do on stage is controlled to the millimetre; I wanted the millisecond…
Budapest City Hall
A group show in Budapest City Hall where my New York photographs represented Gödöllő, of all places. I rather enjoyed the irony of that — a small Hungarian town speaking through pictures of Manhattan.
Rege Gallery, Tihany
For my twentieth year in photography I did something slightly perverse: I printed nothing. Two decades of work ran on a single, endlessly changing digital canvas in the Rege Gallery in Tihany — the gallery…
Rege Gallery, Tihany
With the Hungarian National Ballet Institute we looked at what it actually costs to become someone. The discipline, the falls, the blisters, the getting up again at six in the morning while other children…
Club Skinos, New York
I was the first Hungarian photographer to take fine-art nudes onto the blockchain, and I did it with a charity auction in a Manhattan club. Half provocation, half honest question: what does 'authentic' even…
Rege Gallery, Tihany
I generated portraits with artificial intelligence and hung them on the wall as though they were true. People believed them — and that was precisely the point.
Vienna · Munich
Touch has been under suspicion for far too long. In Vienna and Munich I photographed tantra massage as what I actually found it to be: warm, gold-toned, unhurried care for another human being.
Bewusst Sein Im Fokus, Vienna
No single definition of womanhood survived this project, thank goodness. It became a collective mosaic — many women, many contradictions, no conclusion offered.
CITYgalleryVIENNA, Vienna
An archetype everyone thinks they know. Together with the women I worked with in Vienna we read it again from the beginning — and found something much more interesting than the cliché.
Veszprém
Zsófia Szele writes poems about chronic illness and caregiving, and I answered them with photographs. Quiet work, made in Veszprém, about the kind of endurance nobody applauds.
Exhibition in development · November 2027
A tribute to the spirit of Robert Capa · 20 works · Created March 2026 – September 2027 Full project page — EUFÓRIA →
Contact
Studio enquiries, exhibitions & print sales
The professional side
Commissions, executive portraits, brand and event photography live on my professional site. norbertbanhalmi.com →
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