COURAGE

connecting collections

Josef Kytnar is a programmer and LP collector. His brother played in the band Makyota and Josef was a “non-playing” member of the band. He is the co-author of a discography overview of rock (and similar genres) recordings on LPs (Balák Miroslav, and Kytnar, Josef. 1998. Československý rock na gramofonových deskách: Rocková diskografie 1960–1997. Prague: Indies Records). Josef Kytnar was one of the founders of the Popmuseum, the institution owning a large collection of items connected to Czech and Slovak pop music, and he is active in its branch in Brno, where the archive of LPs is located, until today. Within Popmuseum, he is engaged in the digitization of music records, mainly LPs. He has a collection of almost 10,000 LPs, especially Czech and Slovak rock, pop and jazz music.

Photo artist and journalist Ferenc Kálmándy (b. 1950) started to do photography in 1973. He is a member of the Mecsek Photo Club and a founding member of the photographers’ group Focus, founded in Pécs in 1978. He started his career as a printshop photographer, and he worked for the Baranya County Museums Directorate (1979–1981) and at the Gallery of Pécs as an exhibition designer (1981–82). The Gallery provided a safe background for his art work. On the one hand, portraits made of his colleagues were a typical component of his Focus group photographs. On the other hand, until the mid-1990s, the Pécs Gallery was one of the most influential centers of local underground/alternative cultural life. Many of the employees at the gallery played in new wave bands, which often performed in the Gallery at exhibition openings and also independently.

In 1982, he began to work as a photo journalist for the Hungarian Telegraph Bureau (MTI), and he continued to work in this position until his retirement in 2012. His works were displayed in Hungarian and international exhibitions, both individually and together with compositions by other Focus group members. Members of the Focus group (Tamás Borbély, László Cseri, Örs Harnóczy, Ferenc Kálmándy, Dr. László Lajos, and Péter Marsalkó) considered their most important feature, independent of the genre, the preset arrangement of their photos. As Borbély notes, “We shot pre-planned, pre-arranged pictures on various themes.” Their works featured photo actions, city images, and portrait concepts.

Károy Kály-Kullai (1954– ) is a librarian and one of the creators of the popular music collection in the library at Rottenbiller Street in Budapest (the branch library of the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library/Fővárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár, FSZEK). He was also the initiator of the social service offering support for drug addicts, which worked in cooperation with the music collection.

Kály-Kullai graduated as a Hungarian-Russian teacher, but his interests soon turned to research on drug addiction and mental hygiene. He worked as a librarian between 1981 and 1992. He then served as a leader in the branch library at Rottenbiller Street. He and his colleague Péter Hont began to collect popular music recordings and created a unique collection in the 1970s.